We're 50 years out from a working self-driving car.
Thank you Mr Luddite. It's a shame that we currently live in a perfectly safe world where no pedestrians ever git hit and these darn self-driving cars come along and...
Wait, what? Drivers hit pedestrians all the time? Especially so when they cross in the middle of the street at night in the rain?
Remember, there WAS a human sitting behind the wheel. The fact that he didn't see here / could not react in time means she was (A) really hard to see, and (b) probably came in front of the car very suddenly.
Or (c) probably avoided by an average driver, but the driver wasn't paying attention because the AI was in charge.
We are not 50 years from self-driving cars. We are *0* years from self-driving cars. They are being deployed today and the ramp-up will only continue, because even if they make mistakes it's still FEWER mistakes than people will make, on average.
Really? Do you have evidence for this?
Do you have evidence that self-driving cars have lower accident rates when they drive under the same conditions?
Given that human drivers are required in many scenarios, do you have evidence on how this breaks down, or what happens to total accident rates when the AI drives for 90% or the time and the human for 10%?
Do self-driving cars mean people suddenly much more likely to drive when drunk, tired, or distracted because the AI will be in charge?
You don't need perfect answers for these questions, but they're barely being asked.
Why are they even testing their cars on live streets at this point? Everyone agrees that at least level 4 is required to be truly safe and companies are still trying to master level 3. You can drive around with a bunch of sensors attached and feed the data into a simulation system and see how it reacts, you don't need the AI driving an actual to see if it will react appropriately.
This isn't about safety, this is about companies competing for bragging rights.
Yes I included the voter fraud commission, just because it was disbanded doesn't mean it was a bad idea, just means this commission didn't work out but voter fraud is a serious issue and Trump should be applauded for at least trying to tackle it https://www.nbcnews.com/politi...
I can't recall how many times I heard some Republican claim "oh we found rock solid evidence of 1000 cases of voter fraud!" and you'll later hear that at least 999 of them turned out to be due to crappy government databases and the remaining one almost certainly was as well... but there's also a small chance it was a green card holder who got confused. The GOP just keeps pushing the lie because it serves as an excuse to implement voter IDs, and when you insist that voters need ID to vote, and minorities who vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack IDs, then you suppress some of the Democratic vote.
The only kind of voter fraud that might be frequent enough to change elections is with mail-in ballots. But here the fraud (if it really is significant) is more likely to be from husbands "ensuring" their wives vote correctly, and since men vote Republican the GOP doesn't care. But again, we don't really know if this is significant.
And that is fundamentally why the commission was disbanded. Because voter fraud doesn't exist the Republicans had to fabricate evidence, and because they had to fabricate evidence the couldn't share documents with the Democrats, and because the court ordered them to share documents they had to scrap the whole endeavour.
They're only mad that their proprietary data got out, not that it was being "misused." That's the power of marketing, baby!
Exactly. Can't have other people selling personal data, only Google and Facebook are allowed to do that.
Like it or not I've given consent to Google and Facebook to use my personal data for targeted ads, search results, etc. You may think I and others who've done this have made a dumb choice, you might think there should be regs that manage this relationship, but there has been consent.
Kogan made an agreement with FB that he's collect data only for his app's benefit. He also made an agreement with each user who used his app that the data would only be used for the app's benefit.
And then he went and sold the data to SLC, breaking both of those promises. And then after Kogan and SLC promised to destroy the data they again broke their promise and lied.
This is about fraudulently acquired data for financial gain, "suspension" is a slap on the wrist.
...steel tariffs... Sure he's kinda fulfilling a promise, but he's actually harming the people he was supposed to help.
Again, "You may disagree on what he is doing and disagree on whether his policy will help". I think we both agree that it does count as "fulfilling a promise". Whether it achieves the goal or not is debatable.
There were two parts to your claim, first he's trying to fulfill promises, and second, he's trying to help people.
With the tariffs I think it's fulfilling a promise, but I don't think he actually believes it will help people as much as he thinks a trade war will be exciting and good for his poll numbers.
"tax cut" which was effectively just a massive wealth transfer to the rich
Taxing less is a wealth transfer? That doesn't make sense. Keeping more of the money you earned is a wealth transfer?
The money to fund the tax cut is coming from the treasury and massively raising the debt. Sooner or later that money has to be paid back, either through inflation (everyone is a bit less wealthy), raising taxes down the line, or cutting back on other programs.
The tax cut doesn't make the nation wealthier, it just transfers more of that wealth to the richest.
I guess if you feel entitled to other peoples money.
You're assuming that people create wealth in a void and the only role of government is to take from group A and give to group B. Once you acknowledge just how many external factors affect how much money you earn that statement is meaningless from a taxation perspective.
You're citing a paper from a libertarian think-tank, publish in 1996, arguing that the middle class was growing in 1991.... Why do I care about an off-topic publication looking at wealth distribution 27 years ago?
Economics is not a zero sum game. Taxing a person more doesn't help someone else. Just as taxing a person less doesn't hurt another person. Your choice of words "wealth transfer" is odd to me when talking about a tax cut.
I agree economics is not a zero sum game, and in some circumstances corporate tax cuts help the economy as a whole, but these are not those circumstances. If the cut was helping you'd see evidence in the form of raises and investments, instead they're giving out dividends and buying back shares.
The minuscule amount of economic activity generated is not sufficient to pay the cost, hence a wealth transfer.
nonsensical promises on healthcare and then pushed for a healthcare bill that broke all of them?
He did make a good faith effort and he did succeed in ending the forced mandate. He can't repeal healthcare without Congress.
A good faith effort to do what? Show me his good healthcare bill? Heck, show me any good GOP healthcare bill.
The Congressional bill sucked because their ideas suck, the only viable GOP healthcare plan was mandates, and Obama took those. Now all the other things that could improve healthcare are "liberal" ideas they won't touch.
But I don't think for a moment he really cares about helping his base.
I think he is an idiot that likes the country. I think he does care more so than the average politician. Just my opinion.
You mean how more people got coverage, preexisting conditions went away, and the rate of healthcare growing slowed?
Yeah, it was destroyed.
that needs to be reformatted and reinstalled from scratch
How? Trump said he had a brilliant solution during the election... yet for some reason all we got was a gong show from the legislative branch.
Backing out of Paris was a Very Good Thing since the US was basically going to pay for all the other countries.
Good point, except for the fact it was a non-binding agreement for which you didn't have to pay a dime.
We don't need to sign some agreement to improve our global warming responsiblities.
True. But putting industry lackeys in charge of the DOE and EPA who go out of their way to subsidize coal plants isn't a very good way to start.
POTUS was a global laughing stock before Trump whether you admit that or not.
False but irrelevant, saying you were already overweight when you were 220lbs doesn't mean it's fine that you now weigh 300lbs.
Trump did a few positive things...
Oooh! Someone found a list!
I'm sorry but that list is a joke. Most of the positive side effects are a consequence of a healthy global economy where the US is actually lagging and Presidents probably don't have much affect anyway.
And all those positive effects are going to be swamped by the massive bill from the Corporate (GOP Donor) Tax cut.
As for the rest it's part of his proposed trade war (bye-bye stock market), or heavily partisan actions that most people consider a negative.
Was he lying? It seems to me that he is actually trying to fulfill those promises. You may disagree on what he is doing and disagree on whether his policy will help but I honestly do not believe he lied about trying to help those people. He has been keeping is campaign promises.
How has he lied to them?
So he's going to pass steel tariffs and raise the cost of manufacturing in the US? Sure he's kinda fulfilling a promise, but he's actually harming the people he was supposed to help.
What about the "tax cut" which was effectively just a massive wealth transfer to the rich (including himself), which one of his promises was that?
Or when he made a bunch of nonsensical promises on healthcare and then pushed for a healthcare bill that broke all of them?
I'll agree he's trying to keep out immigrants, reduce trade deals, and build a wall. But I don't think for a moment he really cares about helping his base.
But that's the thing: I think a lot of people don't just like Trump; they want to be him. They want what they see in Trump: the TV job; the cars; the helicopters; the glamorous parties; the flash and bling; the commanded "respect," etc. At some point, though, many of us realized that we weren't going to be the next DLR or EVH. We might have even changed our minds completely, and rejected that person after learning of this or that scandal. Evidently, with Trump, the scandals and his obvious inadequacies for the job of president do not register with these folks. Instead of bringing them down to earth, they just dig in deeper. Maybe someone with a better grasp of psychology could tell you why. I'm guessing dissatisfaction with their personal lives, with likely a large touch of insecurity.
I don't think that's quite it.
People overestimate their capabilities, as a result most people feel they're not doing as well as they deserve to be. Who is to blame for this injustice? The system.
That's why every politician runs on change, because people think if you fix system you'll fix the injustice and they'll be better off.
The problem is that system, while flawed, isn't quite as corrupt as they believe, and when confronted by this reality most politicians end up sounding roughly the same.
Trump is completely dishonest and irresponsible, so not only can he promise to fix the system, but when confronted with the reality that his approach causes way more harm than good he just doesn't care and keeps on Trumping.
It's horrific when you realize the damage he's doing, but from that person who just wants to change "the system" he looks like the only person person willing to stand up to it.
I suspect the vast majority of problems go unreported even when management is responsive.
Why are we basing this on number of complaints? Anyone can file a complaint. One person with an overactive imagination can file multiple complaints without merit. The stat is already skewed far in favor of exaggerating the scope of the problem, and you're proposing skewing it even more. I thought one of the basic premises of our society was innocent until proven guilty?
If you truly want to gauge the scope of the problem, the number you should be looking at is the number of unique persons who were investigated and found to have committed sexual harassment. That eliminates the complaints found to be without merit. And it eliminates multiple complaints against a single individual. So the problem is likely much smaller than one complaint per 521 employees.
Even if 100% of the complaints are legit, the actual problem is probably on the order of one individual being complained against per 2000-5000 employees. If you base it on the number of accusers Bill Cosby has, the problem ends up being one individual in 15,000. Meaning of Microsoft's employee count of 124,000, there are probably only 8 individuals guilty of sexual harassment. And if 9 out of 10 people experiencing harassment don't report it, that still means it's being perpetrated by fewer than 100 individuals. The other 99.9% are innocent.
You math.... strangely.
Lets just look at Bill Cosby for a moment, he raped dozens of women. And the vast majority of victims didn't come forward until decades later when everyone else started coming forward. If rape victims weren't reporting you think victims of sexual harassment are? If you were a woman being sexually harassed at work don't you think your first instinct would be to tough it out and not cause a scene?
It's the pattern that shows up with the majority of the #MeToo cases, one or two women come forward and then half a dozen more suddenly pop up to credibly corroborate their story. And in most of those cases I suspect there's a ton more who never come forward.
It's not surprising when you think about it, would you really want to call up a reporter to talk about getting sexually harassed? Would you want to risk having your name thrown all over the internet as a victim of sexual harassment?
So yes, most workplaces have a lot more than 1 sexual harasser in 521 employees, they probably have a lot more than 0.1% of employees harassing. The question with Microsoft isn't whether this is the tip of the iceberg, because it most certainly is. The question is whether their iceberg is unusually large compared to any other organization.
238 complaints is, based on Microsofts current employee count of around 124,000, one complaint per 521 employees. Over a 6 year period. While a zero rate would be nice, I don't think that's too bad either.
Plus we seem to be getting to that stage where some people consider allegations to be enough that action simply has to be taken, screw the investigation and screw the evidence. An allegation has been made, so punishment must be enacted.
While a world where women are considered a lesser species is certainly a world that needs to be eliminated, a world where mere allegations are enough is not the world we should be aiming to replace it with.
The number seems low but 1/119 (or 238, I'm not confident how we're supposed to read the number) seems lower.
I suspect the vast majority of problems go unreported even when management is responsive. And if there's a perception that management is burying problems then women are going to be even more reluctant to come forward.
./ seems to do well allowing downvotes. There's certainly bias on certain subjects, but in general you find high quality comments on both sides.
I think technology (the moderation system) plays a role, but as tech people I think we tend to overemphasize technology and understate the role of editors in establishing a site's culture. The/. editors simply don't post the sorts of stories and summaries that attract trolls and extremists, as a result the people who mod tend to be more reasoned and open to opposing ideas.
Sites who post controversial stories to drive page views are going to have lower quality comments because that's the people they attract and the tone they set.
Sites who allow users to post stories are going to end up with sections that are cesspools.
I don't think you can fix reddit with the right moderation system, whenever users control the content there's always going to be problematic content.
Slashdot's moderation style is still hands down the best I've seen. I wish more sites adopted it.
I would actually pay money for a good Slashdot moderation style site for discussion other than technology.
I do enjoy the meta-humour where all the posts praising the/. moderation system are generally score 4/5 while the ones opposing are being modded down into oblivion.
What's the point? You (the person being "backed up") is still dead. There might someday be a copy of you, but you, the you alive right now, the one reading this, is dead. You won't wake up in the future. You won't come back. You will be dead.
We still don't know a lot about consciousness, and your critique assumes a very specific definition of "alive" that we can't validate.
It may be that this copy is you in exactly the same sense as you're the same person as you were when you went to sleep last night.
If Trump didn't mean what he said, why did Breitbart run the headline: "Trump the gun grabber"?
So people like you would click on it. See how that works?
They needed to remind Trump that his base was pro-gun.
Why did the NRA feel they needed to have a meeting with him after these comments?
For appearances. So that people like, when they saw that both parties left the meeting without their hair on fire, would be denied the chance to spread around a phony narrative.
The NRA needed to meet with Trump because the NRA realizes that Trump tends to agree with whomever spoke with him last.
You can say people are being dumb and the President didn't mean what he said... But a lot of conservatives seemed to take it the same way.
He was speaking casually, not lawerly. Which you're trying to pretend you don't know, because it helps your narrative to assert otherwise. And no, there aren't any significant number of conservatives are the least bit worried about that. Because he's more than clarified the matter, for those who think a single sound bite out of context is some sort of executed policy.
He was speaking out of his ass because he has no idea what he's talking about. I'm not saying he's an idiot, I honestly don't know if he's smart or dumb. But I do know he has no attention span, you can hear it every time he talks when he goes flying off on tangents left and right and can barely string together two sentences on the same topic.
That's his basic problem as President, issues are complex and he can't pay attention long enough to really analyze the issues, so instead he just listens to people and tries to get the high level picture. The problem is a smart knowledgeable person can make a superficially compelling case for any position in a complex topic. So if you want Trump to decide on a certain course all you need to do is surround him with the right people and he'll eventually agree with you. That's why the GOP is so confident they can sway him on almost any issue unless he's completely obsessed with it (ie trade), because they can control enough of the people he talks to and none of the nuts on his call list want gun control either. Plus, on something like guns you need actual legislation and the GOP controlled congress will never pass significant gun control.
"The investigation is being closed with nothing found."
Cite?
" completely ignore the news that broke today that the whole "Russian hacked the election" and "Russia colluded..."
All I see is some partisan republicans on a house commitee releasing a statement to that effect. Nobody else seems to be buying it; including the Democrats on that same committee. Nevermind the statement from the CIA etc.
In other words: shut up comrade.
After the memo I've been wondering if the Republicans on the house intelligence committee could be charged with obstruction of justice.
I mean if they're deliberately trying to tarnish the investigation and Mueller in order to give Trump cover to shut it down then that's pretty much the definition of obstruction.
Are non-Tesla entities allowed to make supercharger stations? It's a non-issue at this point, but eventually the electric vehicle market will grow large enough to make independently owned charging stations viable.
Not only do you want competition to make sure Tesla never decides to start gouging at the stations, but when more electric vehicles come on the market it would be much better if they all shared a common charging interface. No one wants to wander around town looking for a compatible charge-station.
I wondered how/.ers would handle the cognitive dissonance. Nicely done.
Yes, Trump was totally against protectionism until Musk came up with it. Also, have you heard how orange the guy is? Yuk yuk
I never claimed nor implied that Trump didn't have protectionist leanings.
I claimed that Musk took advantage of Trump's protectionist leanings and current focus of interest and got him to pursue a specific trade policy.
Trump's big protectionist theme is China, yet look at what got this started, the steel and aluminum tariffs, one set of protectionist policies that don't really hurt China. Do you think Trump read a bunch of reports and figured that was the best approach?
No, someone who wanted steel and aluminum tariffs for their own economic/ideological reasons manoeuvred to get Trump in a room with a bunch of steel and aluminum producers... and now you have tariffs!
It's the same play as Musk except a bit less public and they missed the China theme.
Despite the CNBC (and Slashdot) headlines Elon Musk didn't actually side with Trump. He just tweeted at Trump that China was charging duties on US cars, and restricting US ownership of car factories in China, but the US wasn't doing the same in return.
And since Trump was in a mood to make tariffs Musk's reasonable sounding tweet is now well on its way to becoming policy.
Is anyone here really famous and has a 140 (280?) character argument about why a certain tariff should be enacted?
Laughing for no reason seems like a very odd bug, do any Alexa users have a hunch what's happening?
For instance, are there situations were Alexa laughs appropriately and this same laugh is getting triggered by random triggers? Is this some poorly thought out Easter egg or a test feature that wasn't correctly disabled?
That's probably more than enough for the VC and other investors. They want as much marketshare as they can get while the getting is both cheap and the PR is good. They want to turn this into as much a monopoly as they can. Displacing traditional taxis and public transportation in the minds of the public so that when they've reached a monopoly position they can extract as much money as they can.
That's the plan.
I'm not a fan of Uber but barging into marekts with Lawyers and ride giveaways is expensive.
If they establish a position in enough markets it should be fairly simple to ramp down the expenses and become profitable.
I think their biggest risk is the regulatory apparatus becomes fractured enough that the per municipality management and lawyer bills never cover the costs.
There seems to be a thing among the progressive / neo-liberal camp that requires them to screech down at any occupation or practice that they, from their loftier economic perch, would not personally engage in. Hey, I don't want to be an Uber driver either. It's fine. I have several friends who do it for extra cash (or, in one case, because they actually enjoy it - weird, but that's their thing), and none of them are anywhere near dumb enough to do it for a net of $3 and change. That number should, literally, be unbelievable, and yet many people believed it anyway because it fit a highly (absurdly) hyperbolic narrative. There are two problems here: 1) that these people need to be more skeptical (especially when such strong confirmation bias is involved),
I, like many others, were very skeptical of the figure, but thought it could be possible if a) the expenses were not obvious, and b) the median Uber driver didn't stick around long after they figured out the full cost, and/or c) a lot of people didn't mind working for a pittance (or they worked in such a way that a pittance was fine).
and 2) they need to check their fucking privilege. Not everybody has the immediate option of an awesome job, has good spending / saving habits, etc. Just because you wouldn't do something doesn't mean that nobody else should, and fabricating evidence to the contrary is both dishonest and cruel.
Doesn't #2 contradict the supposed implausibility of the $3.37 figure?
Besides, I think this shows a great advantage of the "progressive / neo-liberal camp". If you come to us with evidence that we're wrong we'll generally acknowledge it (at least more so than other camps).
Or is the Uber economist's more confusing than it looks at a glance?
At a high level his argument seems to be that MIT analyzed some data from this survey and came up with an inappropriately low number.
The error the MIT paper is being accused of making is the survey tries to get 3 numbers: 1) How many hours a week do you work on a ridesharing service? 2) How much money do you make in a week? 3) What percentage of your income comes from ridesharing?
So the $3.37 is basically (#2 / #3) / #1 (presumably minus expenses).
The Uber economist claims that respondents actually interpreted the first question as: 1) How many hours a week do you work total?
So if you worked 1 hour ridesharing and made $20, then you worked 40 hours at a regular job then the $20 you made ridesharing would be divided by 41 instead of 1 to give you earnings of ~$0.50/hour.
The problem is the survey questions look a bit odd and the Uber economist claims an even odder interpretation:
Q11: “How many hours per week do you work on average? Combine all of the on-demand services that you work for.”
Q14: “How much money do you make in the average month? Combine the income from all your on-demand activities.”
So the Uber economist claims that the MIT authors interpreted #11 to mean hours only from on-demand services and #14 to be money from all sources. Which is a bizarre interpretation of questions with almost identical questions wording, yet instead of pointing out how weird the interpretation is the Uber economist actually seems to imply that their interpretation is correct and it was the respondents who misunderstood. Which makes me wonder what the actual sequence and context of the questions looked like.
Unfortunately he doesn't link to the study and the survey questions seem to only be available if "If you’re a media member and would like a full question list and anonymized data/calculations used in this report, please make a request here.
The MIT authors seem to be taking the criticism seriously so maybe I just suck at reading, but given the nature of the claimed error it seems like he should be able to make a much clearer argument.
FTA: YouTube’s new moderators, brought in to spot fake, misleading and extreme videos, stumbled in one of their first major tests, mistakenly removing some clips and channels in the midst of a nationwide debate on gun control.
[..]
On Wednesday, the Outline highlighted accounts, including Titus Frost, that were banned from the video site. Frost tweeted on Wednesday that a survivor of the shooting, David Hogg, is an actor. Jerome Corsi of right-wing conspiracy website Infowars said on Tuesday that YouTube had taken down one of his videos and disabled his live stream.
If Frost and Corsi don't qualify as fake, misleading, and extreme then those words have lost meaning.
ps. Has anyone else noticed/. being slow and intermittent the last few days? I wonder if they're on the receiving of a DDOS or something.
To me, that would mean we need more people ready to help out in a situation, not less. And there are other cases of shooters in Texas that were stopped by fellow armed civilians. I remember one a year or two back that occurred in a mall. The body count was very low because the shooter was killed so quickly. But we should just leave the protecting ourselves to the police and sit quietly while being killed and wait for them to come save us. Never mind when it is them doing the killing.
Does a situation where it worked out somewhere exist? Probably, but it's very rare because being an action hero is way tougher than people realize.
If you want to make it a question of reducing casualties I'm happy to evaluate on that ground. The evidence is quite overwhelming, reduce the number of guns and you will reduce the number of people killed, be it in mass killings, individual killings, suicides, and accidents.
Slashdot Mirror
We're 50 years out from a working self-driving car.
Thank you Mr Luddite. It's a shame that we currently live in a perfectly safe world where no pedestrians ever git hit and these darn self-driving cars come along and...
Wait, what? Drivers hit pedestrians all the time? Especially so when they cross in the middle of the street at night in the rain?
Remember, there WAS a human sitting behind the wheel. The fact that he didn't see here / could not react in time means she was (A) really hard to see, and (b) probably came in front of the car very suddenly.
Or (c) probably avoided by an average driver, but the driver wasn't paying attention because the AI was in charge.
We are not 50 years from self-driving cars. We are *0* years from self-driving cars. They are being deployed today and the ramp-up will only continue, because even if they make mistakes it's still FEWER mistakes than people will make, on average.
Really? Do you have evidence for this?
Do you have evidence that self-driving cars have lower accident rates when they drive under the same conditions?
Given that human drivers are required in many scenarios, do you have evidence on how this breaks down, or what happens to total accident rates when the AI drives for 90% or the time and the human for 10%?
Do self-driving cars mean people suddenly much more likely to drive when drunk, tired, or distracted because the AI will be in charge?
You don't need perfect answers for these questions, but they're barely being asked.
Why are they even testing their cars on live streets at this point? Everyone agrees that at least level 4 is required to be truly safe and companies are still trying to master level 3. You can drive around with a bunch of sensors attached and feed the data into a simulation system and see how it reacts, you don't need the AI driving an actual to see if it will react appropriately.
This isn't about safety, this is about companies competing for bragging rights.
Yes I included the voter fraud commission, just because it was disbanded doesn't mean it was a bad idea, just means this commission didn't work out but voter fraud is a serious issue and Trump should be applauded for at least trying to tackle it https://www.nbcnews.com/politi...
Voter fraud is not a problem in the US.
I can't recall how many times I heard some Republican claim "oh we found rock solid evidence of 1000 cases of voter fraud!" and you'll later hear that at least 999 of them turned out to be due to crappy government databases and the remaining one almost certainly was as well... but there's also a small chance it was a green card holder who got confused. The GOP just keeps pushing the lie because it serves as an excuse to implement voter IDs, and when you insist that voters need ID to vote, and minorities who vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack IDs, then you suppress some of the Democratic vote.
The only kind of voter fraud that might be frequent enough to change elections is with mail-in ballots. But here the fraud (if it really is significant) is more likely to be from husbands "ensuring" their wives vote correctly, and since men vote Republican the GOP doesn't care. But again, we don't really know if this is significant.
And that is fundamentally why the commission was disbanded. Because voter fraud doesn't exist the Republicans had to fabricate evidence, and because they had to fabricate evidence the couldn't share documents with the Democrats, and because the court ordered them to share documents they had to scrap the whole endeavour.
Anonymous Coward says "see my other post for more details."
It's a little known fact that all AC posts are written by the same guy.
He's actually quite brilliant but his writings are of wildly inconsistent quality since he hasn't slept in almost 20 years.
They're only mad that their proprietary data got out, not that it was being "misused." That's the power of marketing, baby!
Exactly. Can't have other people selling personal data, only Google and Facebook are allowed to do that.
Like it or not I've given consent to Google and Facebook to use my personal data for targeted ads, search results, etc. You may think I and others who've done this have made a dumb choice, you might think there should be regs that manage this relationship, but there has been consent.
Kogan made an agreement with FB that he's collect data only for his app's benefit. He also made an agreement with each user who used his app that the data would only be used for the app's benefit.
And then he went and sold the data to SLC, breaking both of those promises. And then after Kogan and SLC promised to destroy the data they again broke their promise and lied.
This is about fraudulently acquired data for financial gain, "suspension" is a slap on the wrist.
...steel tariffs... Sure he's kinda fulfilling a promise, but he's actually harming the people he was supposed to help.
Again, "You may disagree on what he is doing and disagree on whether his policy will help". I think we both agree that it does count as "fulfilling a promise". Whether it achieves the goal or not is debatable.
There were two parts to your claim, first he's trying to fulfill promises, and second, he's trying to help people.
With the tariffs I think it's fulfilling a promise, but I don't think he actually believes it will help people as much as he thinks a trade war will be exciting and good for his poll numbers.
"tax cut" which was effectively just a massive wealth transfer to the rich
Taxing less is a wealth transfer? That doesn't make sense. Keeping more of the money you earned is a wealth transfer?
The money to fund the tax cut is coming from the treasury and massively raising the debt. Sooner or later that money has to be paid back, either through inflation (everyone is a bit less wealthy), raising taxes down the line, or cutting back on other programs.
The tax cut doesn't make the nation wealthier, it just transfers more of that wealth to the richest.
I guess if you feel entitled to other peoples money.
You're assuming that people create wealth in a void and the only role of government is to take from group A and give to group B. Once you acknowledge just how many external factors affect how much money you earn that statement is meaningless from a taxation perspective.
However, can you explain: "When upper-income Americans prosper, so do middle-income and lower-income Americans. Conversely, when high earners are stagnating, so are income-earners in all other categories."
You're citing a paper from a libertarian think-tank, publish in 1996, arguing that the middle class was growing in 1991.... Why do I care about an off-topic publication looking at wealth distribution 27 years ago?
Why don't you look at what's happened in the subsequent decades.
Economics is not a zero sum game. Taxing a person more doesn't help someone else. Just as taxing a person less doesn't hurt another person. Your choice of words "wealth transfer" is odd to me when talking about a tax cut.
I agree economics is not a zero sum game, and in some circumstances corporate tax cuts help the economy as a whole, but these are not those circumstances. If the cut was helping you'd see evidence in the form of raises and investments, instead they're giving out dividends and buying back shares.
The minuscule amount of economic activity generated is not sufficient to pay the cost, hence a wealth transfer.
nonsensical promises on healthcare and then pushed for a healthcare bill that broke all of them?
He did make a good faith effort and he did succeed in ending the forced mandate. He can't repeal healthcare without Congress.
A good faith effort to do what? Show me his good healthcare bill? Heck, show me any good GOP healthcare bill.
The Congressional bill sucked because their ideas suck, the only viable GOP healthcare plan was mandates, and Obama took those. Now all the other things that could improve healthcare are "liberal" ideas they won't touch.
But I don't think for a moment he really cares about helping his base.
I think he is an idiot that likes the country. I think he does care more so than the average politician. Just my opinion.
Evidence?
Healthcare was ruined by the last president
You mean how more people got coverage, preexisting conditions went away, and the rate of healthcare growing slowed?
Yeah, it was destroyed.
that needs to be reformatted and reinstalled from scratch
How? Trump said he had a brilliant solution during the election... yet for some reason all we got was a gong show from the legislative branch.
Backing out of Paris was a Very Good Thing since the US was basically going to pay for all the other countries.
Good point, except for the fact it was a non-binding agreement for which you didn't have to pay a dime.
We don't need to sign some agreement to improve our global warming responsiblities.
True. But putting industry lackeys in charge of the DOE and EPA who go out of their way to subsidize coal plants isn't a very good way to start.
POTUS was a global laughing stock before Trump whether you admit that or not.
False but irrelevant, saying you were already overweight when you were 220lbs doesn't mean it's fine that you now weigh 300lbs.
Trump did a few positive things...
Oooh! Someone found a list!
I'm sorry but that list is a joke. Most of the positive side effects are a consequence of a healthy global economy where the US is actually lagging and Presidents probably don't have much affect anyway.
And all those positive effects are going to be swamped by the massive bill from the Corporate (GOP Donor) Tax cut.
As for the rest it's part of his proposed trade war (bye-bye stock market), or heavily partisan actions that most people consider a negative.
You even included
29. Created a commission on voter fraud
The gong show run by a conspiracy theorist that was disbanded in an attempt to shield their improperly withheld documents from disclosure.
Was he lying? It seems to me that he is actually trying to fulfill those promises. You may disagree on what he is doing and disagree on whether his policy will help but I honestly do not believe he lied about trying to help those people. He has been keeping is campaign promises.
How has he lied to them?
So he's going to pass steel tariffs and raise the cost of manufacturing in the US? Sure he's kinda fulfilling a promise, but he's actually harming the people he was supposed to help.
What about the "tax cut" which was effectively just a massive wealth transfer to the rich (including himself), which one of his promises was that?
Or when he made a bunch of nonsensical promises on healthcare and then pushed for a healthcare bill that broke all of them?
I'll agree he's trying to keep out immigrants, reduce trade deals, and build a wall. But I don't think for a moment he really cares about helping his base.
But that's the thing: I think a lot of people don't just like Trump; they want to be him. They want what they see in Trump: the TV job; the cars; the helicopters; the glamorous parties; the flash and bling; the commanded "respect," etc. At some point, though, many of us realized that we weren't going to be the next DLR or EVH. We might have even changed our minds completely, and rejected that person after learning of this or that scandal. Evidently, with Trump, the scandals and his obvious inadequacies for the job of president do not register with these folks. Instead of bringing them down to earth, they just dig in deeper. Maybe someone with a better grasp of psychology could tell you why. I'm guessing dissatisfaction with their personal lives, with likely a large touch of insecurity.
I don't think that's quite it.
People overestimate their capabilities, as a result most people feel they're not doing as well as they deserve to be. Who is to blame for this injustice? The system.
That's why every politician runs on change, because people think if you fix system you'll fix the injustice and they'll be better off.
The problem is that system, while flawed, isn't quite as corrupt as they believe, and when confronted by this reality most politicians end up sounding roughly the same.
Trump is completely dishonest and irresponsible, so not only can he promise to fix the system, but when confronted with the reality that his approach causes way more harm than good he just doesn't care and keeps on Trumping.
It's horrific when you realize the damage he's doing, but from that person who just wants to change "the system" he looks like the only person person willing to stand up to it.
Why are we basing this on number of complaints? Anyone can file a complaint. One person with an overactive imagination can file multiple complaints without merit. The stat is already skewed far in favor of exaggerating the scope of the problem, and you're proposing skewing it even more. I thought one of the basic premises of our society was innocent until proven guilty?
If you truly want to gauge the scope of the problem, the number you should be looking at is the number of unique persons who were investigated and found to have committed sexual harassment. That eliminates the complaints found to be without merit. And it eliminates multiple complaints against a single individual. So the problem is likely much smaller than one complaint per 521 employees.
Even if 100% of the complaints are legit, the actual problem is probably on the order of one individual being complained against per 2000-5000 employees. If you base it on the number of accusers Bill Cosby has, the problem ends up being one individual in 15,000. Meaning of Microsoft's employee count of 124,000, there are probably only 8 individuals guilty of sexual harassment. And if 9 out of 10 people experiencing harassment don't report it, that still means it's being perpetrated by fewer than 100 individuals. The other 99.9% are innocent.
You math.... strangely.
Lets just look at Bill Cosby for a moment, he raped dozens of women. And the vast majority of victims didn't come forward until decades later when everyone else started coming forward. If rape victims weren't reporting you think victims of sexual harassment are? If you were a woman being sexually harassed at work don't you think your first instinct would be to tough it out and not cause a scene?
It's the pattern that shows up with the majority of the #MeToo cases, one or two women come forward and then half a dozen more suddenly pop up to credibly corroborate their story. And in most of those cases I suspect there's a ton more who never come forward.
It's not surprising when you think about it, would you really want to call up a reporter to talk about getting sexually harassed? Would you want to risk having your name thrown all over the internet as a victim of sexual harassment?
So yes, most workplaces have a lot more than 1 sexual harasser in 521 employees, they probably have a lot more than 0.1% of employees harassing. The question with Microsoft isn't whether this is the tip of the iceberg, because it most certainly is. The question is whether their iceberg is unusually large compared to any other organization.
238 complaints is, based on Microsofts current employee count of around 124,000, one complaint per 521 employees. Over a 6 year period. While a zero rate would be nice, I don't think that's too bad either.
Plus we seem to be getting to that stage where some people consider allegations to be enough that action simply has to be taken, screw the investigation and screw the evidence. An allegation has been made, so punishment must be enacted.
While a world where women are considered a lesser species is certainly a world that needs to be eliminated, a world where mere allegations are enough is not the world we should be aiming to replace it with.
The number seems low but 1/119 (or 238, I'm not confident how we're supposed to read the number) seems lower.
I suspect the vast majority of problems go unreported even when management is responsive. And if there's a perception that management is burying problems then women are going to be even more reluctant to come forward.
./ seems to do well allowing downvotes. There's certainly bias on certain subjects, but in general you find high quality comments on both sides.
I think technology (the moderation system) plays a role, but as tech people I think we tend to overemphasize technology and understate the role of editors in establishing a site's culture. The /. editors simply don't post the sorts of stories and summaries that attract trolls and extremists, as a result the people who mod tend to be more reasoned and open to opposing ideas.
Sites who post controversial stories to drive page views are going to have lower quality comments because that's the people they attract and the tone they set.
Sites who allow users to post stories are going to end up with sections that are cesspools.
I don't think you can fix reddit with the right moderation system, whenever users control the content there's always going to be problematic content.
Slashdot's moderation style is still hands down the best I've seen. I wish more sites adopted it.
I would actually pay money for a good Slashdot moderation style site for discussion other than technology.
I do enjoy the meta-humour where all the posts praising the /. moderation system are generally score 4/5 while the ones opposing are being modded down into oblivion.
What's the point? You (the person being "backed up") is still dead. There might someday be a copy of you, but you, the you alive right now, the one reading this, is dead. You won't wake up in the future. You won't come back. You will be dead.
We still don't know a lot about consciousness, and your critique assumes a very specific definition of "alive" that we can't validate.
It may be that this copy is you in exactly the same sense as you're the same person as you were when you went to sleep last night.
Er, is being a career spymaster a bad thing for leading the CIA? Just wondering.
Given the choice between a Trump selected appointee and promoting the worst deputy director you could find I'd have to choose the deputy director.
I'm curious to see how long she lasts, I don't imagine the CIA is an agency Trump wants in the hands of someone who isn't a crony.
If Trump didn't mean what he said, why did Breitbart run the headline: "Trump the gun grabber"?
So people like you would click on it. See how that works?
They needed to remind Trump that his base was pro-gun.
Why did the NRA feel they needed to have a meeting with him after these comments?
For appearances. So that people like, when they saw that both parties left the meeting without their hair on fire, would be denied the chance to spread around a phony narrative.
The NRA needed to meet with Trump because the NRA realizes that Trump tends to agree with whomever spoke with him last.
You can say people are being dumb and the President didn't mean what he said... But a lot of conservatives seemed to take it the same way.
He was speaking casually, not lawerly. Which you're trying to pretend you don't know, because it helps your narrative to assert otherwise. And no, there aren't any significant number of conservatives are the least bit worried about that. Because he's more than clarified the matter, for those who think a single sound bite out of context is some sort of executed policy.
He was speaking out of his ass because he has no idea what he's talking about. I'm not saying he's an idiot, I honestly don't know if he's smart or dumb. But I do know he has no attention span, you can hear it every time he talks when he goes flying off on tangents left and right and can barely string together two sentences on the same topic.
That's his basic problem as President, issues are complex and he can't pay attention long enough to really analyze the issues, so instead he just listens to people and tries to get the high level picture. The problem is a smart knowledgeable person can make a superficially compelling case for any position in a complex topic. So if you want Trump to decide on a certain course all you need to do is surround him with the right people and he'll eventually agree with you. That's why the GOP is so confident they can sway him on almost any issue unless he's completely obsessed with it (ie trade), because they can control enough of the people he talks to and none of the nuts on his call list want gun control either. Plus, on something like guns you need actual legislation and the GOP controlled congress will never pass significant gun control.
"The investigation is being closed with nothing found."
Cite?
" completely ignore the news that broke today that the whole "Russian hacked the election" and "Russia colluded ..."
All I see is some partisan republicans on a house commitee releasing a statement to that effect. Nobody else seems to be buying it; including the Democrats on that same committee. Nevermind the statement from the CIA etc.
In other words: shut up comrade.
After the memo I've been wondering if the Republicans on the house intelligence committee could be charged with obstruction of justice.
I mean if they're deliberately trying to tarnish the investigation and Mueller in order to give Trump cover to shut it down then that's pretty much the definition of obstruction.
Are non-Tesla entities allowed to make supercharger stations? It's a non-issue at this point, but eventually the electric vehicle market will grow large enough to make independently owned charging stations viable.
Not only do you want competition to make sure Tesla never decides to start gouging at the stations, but when more electric vehicles come on the market it would be much better if they all shared a common charging interface. No one wants to wander around town looking for a compatible charge-station.
I wondered how /.ers would handle the cognitive dissonance. Nicely done.
Yes, Trump was totally against protectionism until Musk came up with it. Also, have you heard how orange the guy is? Yuk yuk
I never claimed nor implied that Trump didn't have protectionist leanings.
I claimed that Musk took advantage of Trump's protectionist leanings and current focus of interest and got him to pursue a specific trade policy.
Trump's big protectionist theme is China, yet look at what got this started, the steel and aluminum tariffs, one set of protectionist policies that don't really hurt China. Do you think Trump read a bunch of reports and figured that was the best approach?
No, someone who wanted steel and aluminum tariffs for their own economic/ideological reasons manoeuvred to get Trump in a room with a bunch of steel and aluminum producers... and now you have tariffs!
It's the same play as Musk except a bit less public and they missed the China theme.
Despite the CNBC (and Slashdot) headlines Elon Musk didn't actually side with Trump.
He just tweeted at Trump that China was charging duties on US cars, and restricting US ownership of car factories in China, but the US wasn't doing the same in return.
And since Trump was in a mood to make tariffs Musk's reasonable sounding tweet is now well on its way to becoming policy.
Is anyone here really famous and has a 140 (280?) character argument about why a certain tariff should be enacted?
This is your opportunity to write US policy!
Laughing for no reason seems like a very odd bug, do any Alexa users have a hunch what's happening?
For instance, are there situations were Alexa laughs appropriately and this same laugh is getting triggered by random triggers? Is this some poorly thought out Easter egg or a test feature that wasn't correctly disabled?
I suppose a hacker is a possibility as well.
That's probably more than enough for the VC and other investors. They want as much marketshare as they can get while the getting is both cheap and the PR is good. They want to turn this into as much a monopoly as they can. Displacing traditional taxis and public transportation in the minds of the public so that when they've reached a monopoly position they can extract as much money as they can.
That's the plan.
I'm not a fan of Uber but barging into marekts with Lawyers and ride giveaways is expensive.
If they establish a position in enough markets it should be fairly simple to ramp down the expenses and become profitable.
I think their biggest risk is the regulatory apparatus becomes fractured enough that the per municipality management and lawyer bills never cover the costs.
There seems to be a thing among the progressive / neo-liberal camp that requires them to screech down at any occupation or practice that they, from their loftier economic perch, would not personally engage in. Hey, I don't want to be an Uber driver either. It's fine. I have several friends who do it for extra cash (or, in one case, because they actually enjoy it - weird, but that's their thing), and none of them are anywhere near dumb enough to do it for a net of $3 and change. That number should, literally, be unbelievable, and yet many people believed it anyway because it fit a highly (absurdly) hyperbolic narrative. There are two problems here: 1) that these people need to be more skeptical (especially when such strong confirmation bias is involved),
I, like many others, were very skeptical of the figure, but thought it could be possible if a) the expenses were not obvious, and b) the median Uber driver didn't stick around long after they figured out the full cost, and/or c) a lot of people didn't mind working for a pittance (or they worked in such a way that a pittance was fine).
and 2) they need to check their fucking privilege. Not everybody has the immediate option of an awesome job, has good spending / saving habits, etc. Just because you wouldn't do something doesn't mean that nobody else should, and fabricating evidence to the contrary is both dishonest and cruel.
Doesn't #2 contradict the supposed implausibility of the $3.37 figure?
Besides, I think this shows a great advantage of the "progressive / neo-liberal camp". If you come to us with evidence that we're wrong we'll generally acknowledge it (at least more so than other camps).
Or is the Uber economist's more confusing than it looks at a glance?
At a high level his argument seems to be that MIT analyzed some data from this survey and came up with an inappropriately low number.
The error the MIT paper is being accused of making is the survey tries to get 3 numbers:
1) How many hours a week do you work on a ridesharing service?
2) How much money do you make in a week?
3) What percentage of your income comes from ridesharing?
So the $3.37 is basically (#2 / #3) / #1 (presumably minus expenses).
The Uber economist claims that respondents actually interpreted the first question as:
1) How many hours a week do you work total?
So if you worked 1 hour ridesharing and made $20, then you worked 40 hours at a regular job then the $20 you made ridesharing would be divided by 41 instead of 1 to give you earnings of ~$0.50/hour.
The problem is the survey questions look a bit odd and the Uber economist claims an even odder interpretation:
Q11: “How many hours per week do you work on average? Combine all of the on-demand services that you work for.”
Q14: “How much money do you make in the average month? Combine the income from all your on-demand activities.”
So the Uber economist claims that the MIT authors interpreted #11 to mean hours only from on-demand services and #14 to be money from all sources. Which is a bizarre interpretation of questions with almost identical questions wording, yet instead of pointing out how weird the interpretation is the Uber economist actually seems to imply that their interpretation is correct and it was the respondents who misunderstood. Which makes me wonder what the actual sequence and context of the questions looked like.
Unfortunately he doesn't link to the study and the survey questions seem to only be available if "If you’re a media member and would like a full question list and anonymized data/calculations used in this report, please make a request here.
The MIT authors seem to be taking the criticism seriously so maybe I just suck at reading, but given the nature of the claimed error it seems like he should be able to make a much clearer argument.
FTA:
YouTube’s new moderators, brought in to spot fake, misleading and extreme videos, stumbled in one of their first major tests, mistakenly removing some clips and channels in the midst of a nationwide debate on gun control.
[..]
On Wednesday, the Outline highlighted accounts, including Titus Frost, that were banned from the video site. Frost tweeted on Wednesday that a survivor of the shooting, David Hogg, is an actor. Jerome Corsi of right-wing conspiracy website Infowars said on Tuesday that YouTube had taken down one of his videos and disabled his live stream.
If Frost and Corsi don't qualify as fake, misleading, and extreme then those words have lost meaning.
ps. Has anyone else noticed /. being slow and intermittent the last few days? I wonder if they're on the receiving of a DDOS or something.
To me, that would mean we need more people ready to help out in a situation, not less. And there are other cases of shooters in Texas that were stopped by fellow armed civilians. I remember one a year or two back that occurred in a mall. The body count was very low because the shooter was killed so quickly. But we should just leave the protecting ourselves to the police and sit quietly while being killed and wait for them to come save us. Never mind when it is them doing the killing.
Does a situation where it worked out somewhere exist? Probably, but it's very rare because being an action hero is way tougher than people realize.
If you want to make it a question of reducing casualties I'm happy to evaluate on that ground. The evidence is quite overwhelming, reduce the number of guns and you will reduce the number of people killed, be it in mass killings, individual killings, suicides, and accidents.