When presented with a problem, you either address the problem or tolerate it and adapt somehow. Im my opinion, climate-deniers have won this battle. We're well past the point of addressing the problem. The consequences are gonna hit, and our species is gonna have to adapt
At the start, Assange had this idea of Wikileaks being a truly neutral repository of information. That idea had real merit, and still does. It went to crap from there. Badly. The US hasn't exactly been honorable in how they've dealt with him, but it's obvious that Assange decided to start playing with the big boys - geopolitics, espionage, that sort of thing.
I lost the last shred of any sympathy for him when it became obvious that he actively colluded with Russia to screw with US election integrity. Sorry MAGA-types that are gonna bristle at that.... it's been pretty well documented. At this point, he's basically a self-declared enemy of the state.
You step into the ring with the heavyweights, you better be ready to get knocked around. Asange's chances of avoiding extradition are growing vanishingly small. He'll be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
This sounds like a reasonably well-thought out idea. Kudos to the current administration for drafting an intelligent idea.
It probably won't go anywhere. GOP presidents tend to do this. Pull a bunch of dumb crap and then they wonder why they lack the mojo to implement something intelligent.
Bush junior did this. One grudge war, re-introduced torture into our society, one irresponsible tax cut, VP shotgunned people in the face (wish I was kidding). At one point, a very large contingent of justice department officials nearly resigned en-mass just to make a point. Opened Guantanamo Bay, etc. etc. etc. After 6 years of crap, he tried to push a thoughtful, moderate, balanced, reasonable fair immigration bill and by then people were barely even paying attention to him.
Trump following same pattern. So much fecal matter spewing out of his mouth I can't even begin to list it. When his admin proposes something thoughtful, it's gonna get lost in the massive fart smell emanating from the administration.
Sigh. I can't tell if you're trolling, willfully ignorant, or just plain ignorant. This is a SUPER OLD question that's been answered thousands of times. I'm gonna make exactly one effort to explain it to you. Suspecting you're gonna reject it and come back at me with something inane, but here goes....
I'm gonna assume you're US and run on english units. So, your body temperature averages 98.6 on a good day, but sometimes it varies down a bit, and when you're really sick it shoots up to around 105 F. There's variance in your body temp. So, what happens if your average temp goes up by three degrees? For the sake of conversation, assume that you just add 3 to your temp all the time. That can't have a big effect, right? I mean, 3 degrees is absolutely nothing!
Well, actually, it has a huge effect effect. As in "you die fairly quickly" type of effect. If you're running at 98.6+3=101.3 degrees on average, you FEEL LIKE ABSOLUTE CRAP. Most of the time. It's like you have a constant minor flu. You have a hard time working, thinking, procreating, or doing anything else. Your body wears down really fast. You evolved to have a 98.6 body temp and 101.3 is not a good thing at all.
Furthermore, the first time you actually get sick, instead of hitting 105 (which you can recover from) you hit 108 (which kills you dead).
The bottom line: for most life, it's the increase at the extremes that makes the huge difference.
Same thing happens to ecosystems except they've been shown to be even more sensitive. In a green farmland area, the temp varies from some low to some high. During the hot summer, everything gets a bit brown but doesn't die out completely. However, there is a threshold temp at which a bunch of things will just flat-out die. A few degrees of increase in average temperature means that during some hot summer week, the temp goes above the threshold and kills a bunch of things instead of just making them go brown. The ecosystem then alters in terms of what grows back. Just a few die-offs like this will result in an alteration to desert, or some other ecosystem. In any case, it doesn't return to what it was before. Result: farmland becomes not-farmland.
I'm pretty sure you don't care about the environment for it's own sake, so let me put it this way. The human population depends on a fairly small number of "breadbasket" regions for a lot of its food. If a bunch of these become unproductive in a very short period of time, our civilization could get badly disrupted. Could we adapt? Yes. Might it be painful and worth avoiding? Probably.
So much hyperbole on facebook recently in so many directions.
Zuckerberg is not a saint or a devil, not a megalomaniac, not intent on ruling the world, not all that intent on changing it. He's very intelligent and hard working, but no more so than hundreds of thousands of other people. He's not a genius and has no particularly unique vision. He is neither evil nor especially good.
Zuckerberg is a guy who dropped out of college to develop a web app. There were (at least) thousands of other people doing exactly this in the late 90s and early 2000s. His app wasn't (and isn't) particularly original - lots of people had ideas for social networking apps. Through a bit of savvy business strategy and a lot of pure dumb luck, he wound up as one of the very few people who made it big from that wave of app developers.
Don't lose sight of the fact that ZUCKERBERG IS AN AD MAN. Companies pay him to display ads in places where lots of eyeballs will see them. That's his business. Period. End. Of. Story. His ad medium is an internet-based social networking service. Before that, ad men used cable TV. Before that, broadcast TV. Before that, magazines and newspapers. New medium, same business. One can make arguments that computing and the internet make it fundamentally different, but that's just hubris. "I must be unique from all the generations of human that came before me". Sorry, nope. The internet hasn't transformed us into anything substantially different.
You want to know what facebook is going to do or say in any situation? Ask yourself what would maintain or expand their ability to SELL ADS to other companies. That's what they'll do. That's their business. That's why they exist.
Your first point has some validity, but it's really easy to make the right call after the event, when all the facts are known. When presented with a speeder in reality, the cops have to make a snap judgement call: do we allow the speeder to go for now and arrest later? If we do, he might just keep on speeding through 25mph streets and eventually flatten a toddler. In that case, a high speed chase might prevent a death. On the other hand, if he's just trying to get away from us, then we should let him go and do exactly what you said. Arrest later. I don't envy having to make that call.
You're analyzing the bridge situation in the same way. The guy turned out to be harmless.The cops could have been a lot more relaxed in dealing with it, but ONLY IF THEY WERE OMNISCIENT AT THAT POINT IN TIME. They aren't. At that point in time that the cops had no way of knowing if he was suicidal, a prankster, a vandal hoping to drop a brick on traffic, a terrorist, or just a dumb teenage monkey trying to get a selfie. They had to make a call that balanced safety, convenience and police resources.
You're right, of course. I was trying to point out that thing's aren't black-and-white as simply as possible. The idea that there might be even more layers of nuance? Let's be careful not to blow people's minds up too quickly.
I'm gonna be bit harsh in my response - This is a standard logic fail and people on this site should know better by now.
When the cops chase a speeder and cause an accidental death, people decide that cop chases are the root of all traffic accidents. This only makes sense if you ignore the fact that speeders cause tons of death themselves.
When an ultra-rare adverse immunization event causes a death, people conclude immunizations are evil. Forget the fact that immunization has been absolutely proven to save more lives than..... well, pretty much anything else, with the exception of perhaps antibiotics.
Seat belts occasionally decapitate someone, so some idiots conclude that seat belts are fascism. Seat belts actually save tons of lives? Irrelevant! One guy died from them and that makes people mad.
Some teenage monkey with social media on the brain and wwwwwaaayyyy too much testosterone in his veins climbs a public bridge and launches a drone. The cops close the bridge in order to deal with it safely. Your conclusion - cops are bad! Possibility he might fall? Drop something onto a car below? Gawkers create a multicar pile-up in the middle of the bridge? Cops or safety workers might get hit by a car while dealing with the situation? Nah, all irrelevant. Most people don't like being told what to do and everyone has seen a Youtube video of some guy being abused by a cop! Screw The Man!
We're not islands. We live in large social groups. We're governed by a complex, evolving, imperfect set of rules that allow *most* of us to get along *most* of the time. Occasionally the rules are arbitrary or just plain wrong and lead to stupidity. When that happens, people need to call out the flaws in the rules so they can be modified. Cops aren't perfect, and authorities sometimes make bad calls. The cops probably called this one right. Hard truth: occasionally your freedom to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, gets curtailed in order to keep you from putting 150 people around you in danger. That's what happened here. Boo hoo.
But only to a point. Nice to meet you, idealism. I'd like to introduce you to my friend, reality.
Huge numbers of people rely on public infrastructure. There are rules that govern how people behave in public spaces, since the actions of one person can have a bad effect on large numbers of others. An irresponsible drone operator on a bridge could easily crash a quadcopter into a car, leading to a chain of accidents that could result in death. This guy clearly needed to be arrested and slapped with a fine large enough to deter him from doing it again.
Make public rules too loose, and the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless. Make public rules too tight, and you restrict personal freedoms of movement and expression. Yes, there is a sweet spot in the middle. No, we haven't quite found it yet for drone operation. Using a public bridge like a personal jungle gym, however, is firmly in "idiot" territory.
I think you're being a tad harsh on the US. First, let me be the first to acknowledge that the US has PLENTY of problems. However, it also has one of the most dynamic, healthy, advanced economies on the planet. One of the richer ones per-capita also, though not #1. I'm firmly against forcing our system on others, but the truth is that our economic system could make a TON of other countries a LOT better off, if they would just swallow their pride and adopt it (looking at you, South America).
If the 4-day work week actually improves productivity and competitiveness, you'll see it adopted in the US fairly quickly.
With regards to unions - there are places that could benefit from more unionization, and there are other places where unions are absolutely strangling progress.
There are very, very few dependable pools of good jobs. Most job descriptions constantly change - emerging, growing, adapting, stagnating, expanding or being automated out of existence. Very few job descriptions stay constant for very long.
On the up side, this is a good thing. When society realizes that there is an unmet need for a particular set of skills, people rush/train to meet the need. High demand and a low supply of qualified people means good compensation. For a while at least.
On the down side, it can be quite a bit more brutal. When a field gets automated, some people manage to keep the few jobs that still exist, and some manage to move into another field by retraining or adapting their pre-existing skills to new conditions. However, it turns out that many people are 1) poor at adapting and 2) incapable of being trained for a job more than once in their lives. These people wind up with permanently reduced income. Understandably, they tend to be unhappy about it.
I really hope that Google employees pay attention and complete the killing of this project regardless of whatever it morphs into. They're basically saving the company from itself.
First off, I completely agree with the human-rights angle here. China isn't the worst player on the planet. Not by a long shot. However, they are far from being the best. In the long run, it's better for Google to stay away from supporting Chinese internet. History would NOT judge them kindly for taking part in something that's widely recognized as a pretty oppressive system. Their leadership is seriously blinded by short term profit if they don't see this.
However, I seriously question the possibility of ANY profit from this project, period. Who in their right mind thinks that China would turn internet search over to a non-Chinese company? really? reeeealllllly? Google executives appear to have forgotten that China is only half capitalist. The other half is iron-fisted state-directed economics. Okay, the Chinese government MIGHT be willing to cede some extreme minority of the search market to Google, but only in exchange for complete control, the source code, and every other piece of tech that Google has ever developed. In exchange for about 1% of their search market, I'm sure. What a colossally dumb idea. This is what the Google executives were making a priority? Really?
It's just one more data point showing that top executives are mostly regular or slightly-above-average schmoes who lucked into the position. They aren't geniuses and they don't have any kind of extraordinary ability. They are successful business types who were in the right place at the right time. Nothing more.
Long form journalism is still pretty good at the NYT. Other than that, it's mostly moved to the weekly-published magazines. US News and World Report. Economist. Stuff like that.
Only sometimes. Yes, sickle-cell anemia carriers get a benefit. I think that there are lots of others that don't. Tay-Sachs carriers don't get any advantage (that we've been able to identify).
Natural selection will still play out in the era of gene editing. Bad edits will become glaringly obvious within a generation or two. Probably earlier. Gene edits that render people less able to have children for ANY reason will be strongly selected against the natural way. Like you said, 12-inch reproductive members on men could render them sterile, plus it might make it hard to find a partner to reproduce with. I'm not sure how many women out there actually want that... another example.... extreme intelligence could very well render a person utterly intolerable as a partner. Specific gene edits that produce unexpectedly bad results won't continue to be used by parents in the future. Nature will continue to weed out the individuals that have problems reproducing.
The gene edits that produce more fit people will render them more likely to reproduce or will be selected by more and more future parents.
It took a while but the next generation of tech companies are all grown up. Amazon moving into DC and NYC (political and financial centers of power) and now Facebook buying influence.
Don't get me wrong. It doesn't make me mad. Natural progression of a companies growth.
Completely agree. They aren't lazy at all. The numbers I've read show that they're harder working and smarter than previous generations. They use less drugs too.
And there's other angles to the story as well. With the exception of a few top performers, most millennials won't make it into better paying positions until the older generation gets too decrepit to work and has no choice but to relinquish the wheel. And when they finally do make good pay, they will discover that the entire system has been designed to deny them stable benefits. Screw pensions, invest in the market for your own damn retirement. We oldies don't owe you a thing. But hand's off OUR pensions. Those are sacred.
The irony is that closing millennials out of the pension systems means that there aren't many young people paying in. In 20 years, those pension systems will be near-bust and will have no choice but to drastically reduce benefits. At that point, a ton of old people will suffer. Funny that the millennials who are being forced to invest for retirement in market-based options will probably be mostly fine. Karma I guess.
Yup, that's a good idea, but it also creates problems that people aren't willing to solve at the moment.
Actually, I'm in exactly that retirement situation. I'm exempt from social security because I qualified for a state pension, and I'm exempt from a state pension because I was given a 403B plan plus a healthy match from the employer. My retirement is completely dependent on a private investment portfolio.
The good news: that portfolio is projected to be fairly large by the time I need it. The bad news: if it fails, the only thing between me and homelessness at retirement is welfare.
I wonder how much of the pension shortfall is because of exactly people like me. Not that I had a say in it. Most old people, conservatives and hardcore free-market types absolutely hate the idea of pensions. Fox news says that pensions are filthy socialism so they have to be evil, right? They've done their best to kill benefits for young people. Of course, they protect their own pensions, but that's fake news. They've engineered the compensation system in the US so that younger professionals are pushed into investment options. Fine, but guess what? That means young people's money isn't going in to support the pension fund. Lots of retirees drawing money out, and young people actively discouraged from opting in. Strangely, the pension funds seem to be badly underfunded. Probably more fake news.
Private pensions can't die fast enough. They should be flat-out illegal. No private company has the discipline to put the needs of long-term employees first for the decades necessary to operate a pension plan. The temptation to raid the funds is too great. After the funds are depleted, the companies declare a short, clean bankruptcy and get a judge to reduce their pension obligations by some huge fraction. The companies emerge from the bankruptcy even stronger, without those pesky obligations to pay their pensioners. I know several people on private pension plans that had their benefits deeply cut by corporate legal maneuvers.
State pension plans are better, but in the US there's probably going to be a large wave of benefits-reduction as deficits get too large to sustain, and a smaller wave of straight-up state defaults.
Social security is probably the only pension system that I would trust at this point.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but my understanding is that most scammer/robocaller outfits are located overseas in *very* poor countries where there is very little prospect for actual productive work. So, people do this for a living instead and manage to scrape out a pretty decent income, but only by local standards. They wind up in the upper-middle class, but only in comparison to the rest of their neighbors in rural Ghana. So, the actual income generated by the activity is pretty low. They only need to score one hit per zillion phone calls to make it work. A tenth of a cent per call will shut them down cold. Heck, even a hundredth of a penny would probably do the trick.
Yes, there have been a few people who made serious $ through robocalling, but I think that those are the exception.
Compare this to virtually any company operating for realzies in the west. Their generated revenues will be orders of magnitude larger.
Yeah. Totally not the same as Hillary Clinton. Fox News tells us that Hillary was selling children's organs through her personal email server, and Ivanka was just doing extra credit work to end cyberbullying and world hunger. Totally different. MAGA. Lock her up. Trump tells us that federal laws don't apply to the first family anyway. Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Fake News. Liberal Media is the enemy.
I think that a minuscule charge would stop robocallers in their tracks because their profit-per-call ratio is probably crazy low. A tiny monetary cost per call would sink them while most (some?) businesses would be able to handle it.
In terms of real companies that want to call hundreds, or thousands or more people per day, my response is mostly this: too bad, you get to eat the extra costs. If you're going to burn people's time on the phone, you pay for the privilege. More than 95% of my cell phone calls are absolute junk - I would welcome putting most telephone-reliant businesses into bankruptcy. That's sort of the whole point.
Another angle - a legitimate company with a legitimate business plan can probably pass the costs on to the customers in the form of a 0.1% increase in costs. If they can't, they're probably so close to the razors edge of bankruptcy that they were headed there anyway.
There could be exemptions for things like local government announcements and emergency broadcasts.
Reverse charging is probably the ONLY thing that will prevent this. Want to call me? You need a validated credit card that deposits a tenth of a penny into my account. If this service was available, I would sign up for it in an instant. Robocalls would drop to very nearly zero and they would stay there.
My suspicion: it was all for the drama and press. The "competition" was just another form of reality entertainment to generate headlines and click counts.
They chose the government center of the country, and the financial center of the country, and divided the headquarters between the two. Yes, it's now obvious that it was the plan all along. They wanted a presence in the corridors of power, and now they have it.
But I seriously doubt they got any sweet financial deals. NYC and DC don't give out painful tax breaks to attract business. Companies come to them. Not vice versa. Not even for outfits the size of Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
When presented with a problem, you either address the problem or tolerate it and adapt somehow. Im my opinion, climate-deniers have won this battle. We're well past the point of addressing the problem. The consequences are gonna hit, and our species is gonna have to adapt
At the start, Assange had this idea of Wikileaks being a truly neutral repository of information. That idea had real merit, and still does. It went to crap from there. Badly. The US hasn't exactly been honorable in how they've dealt with him, but it's obvious that Assange decided to start playing with the big boys - geopolitics, espionage, that sort of thing.
.... it's been pretty well documented. At this point, he's basically a self-declared enemy of the state.
I lost the last shred of any sympathy for him when it became obvious that he actively colluded with Russia to screw with US election integrity. Sorry MAGA-types that are gonna bristle at that
You step into the ring with the heavyweights, you better be ready to get knocked around. Asange's chances of avoiding extradition are growing vanishingly small. He'll be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
This sounds like a reasonably well-thought out idea. Kudos to the current administration for drafting an intelligent idea.
It probably won't go anywhere. GOP presidents tend to do this. Pull a bunch of dumb crap and then they wonder why they lack the mojo to implement something intelligent.
Bush junior did this. One grudge war, re-introduced torture into our society, one irresponsible tax cut, VP shotgunned people in the face (wish I was kidding). At one point, a very large contingent of justice department officials nearly resigned en-mass just to make a point. Opened Guantanamo Bay, etc. etc. etc. After 6 years of crap, he tried to push a thoughtful, moderate, balanced, reasonable fair immigration bill and by then people were barely even paying attention to him.
Trump following same pattern. So much fecal matter spewing out of his mouth I can't even begin to list it. When his admin proposes something thoughtful, it's gonna get lost in the massive fart smell emanating from the administration.
Sigh. I can't tell if you're trolling, willfully ignorant, or just plain ignorant. This is a SUPER OLD question that's been answered thousands of times. I'm gonna make exactly one effort to explain it to you. Suspecting you're gonna reject it and come back at me with something inane, but here goes....
I'm gonna assume you're US and run on english units. So, your body temperature averages 98.6 on a good day, but sometimes it varies down a bit, and when you're really sick it shoots up to around 105 F. There's variance in your body temp. So, what happens if your average temp goes up by three degrees? For the sake of conversation, assume that you just add 3 to your temp all the time. That can't have a big effect, right? I mean, 3 degrees is absolutely nothing!
Well, actually, it has a huge effect effect. As in "you die fairly quickly" type of effect. If you're running at 98.6+3=101.3 degrees on average, you FEEL LIKE ABSOLUTE CRAP. Most of the time. It's like you have a constant minor flu. You have a hard time working, thinking, procreating, or doing anything else. Your body wears down really fast. You evolved to have a 98.6 body temp and 101.3 is not a good thing at all.
Furthermore, the first time you actually get sick, instead of hitting 105 (which you can recover from) you hit 108 (which kills you dead).
The bottom line: for most life, it's the increase at the extremes that makes the huge difference.
Same thing happens to ecosystems except they've been shown to be even more sensitive. In a green farmland area, the temp varies from some low to some high. During the hot summer, everything gets a bit brown but doesn't die out completely. However, there is a threshold temp at which a bunch of things will just flat-out die. A few degrees of increase in average temperature means that during some hot summer week, the temp goes above the threshold and kills a bunch of things instead of just making them go brown. The ecosystem then alters in terms of what grows back. Just a few die-offs like this will result in an alteration to desert, or some other ecosystem. In any case, it doesn't return to what it was before. Result: farmland becomes not-farmland.
I'm pretty sure you don't care about the environment for it's own sake, so let me put it this way. The human population depends on a fairly small number of "breadbasket" regions for a lot of its food. If a bunch of these become unproductive in a very short period of time, our civilization could get badly disrupted. Could we adapt? Yes. Might it be painful and worth avoiding? Probably.
So much hyperbole on facebook recently in so many directions.
Zuckerberg is not a saint or a devil, not a megalomaniac, not intent on ruling the world, not all that intent on changing it. He's very intelligent and hard working, but no more so than hundreds of thousands of other people. He's not a genius and has no particularly unique vision. He is neither evil nor especially good.
Zuckerberg is a guy who dropped out of college to develop a web app. There were (at least) thousands of other people doing exactly this in the late 90s and early 2000s. His app wasn't (and isn't) particularly original - lots of people had ideas for social networking apps. Through a bit of savvy business strategy and a lot of pure dumb luck, he wound up as one of the very few people who made it big from that wave of app developers.
Don't lose sight of the fact that ZUCKERBERG IS AN AD MAN. Companies pay him to display ads in places where lots of eyeballs will see them. That's his business. Period. End. Of. Story. His ad medium is an internet-based social networking service. Before that, ad men used cable TV. Before that, broadcast TV. Before that, magazines and newspapers. New medium, same business. One can make arguments that computing and the internet make it fundamentally different, but that's just hubris. "I must be unique from all the generations of human that came before me". Sorry, nope. The internet hasn't transformed us into anything substantially different.
You want to know what facebook is going to do or say in any situation? Ask yourself what would maintain or expand their ability to SELL ADS to other companies. That's what they'll do. That's their business. That's why they exist.
Your first point has some validity, but it's really easy to make the right call after the event, when all the facts are known. When presented with a speeder in reality, the cops have to make a snap judgement call: do we allow the speeder to go for now and arrest later? If we do, he might just keep on speeding through 25mph streets and eventually flatten a toddler. In that case, a high speed chase might prevent a death. On the other hand, if he's just trying to get away from us, then we should let him go and do exactly what you said. Arrest later. I don't envy having to make that call.
You're analyzing the bridge situation in the same way. The guy turned out to be harmless.The cops could have been a lot more relaxed in dealing with it, but ONLY IF THEY WERE OMNISCIENT AT THAT POINT IN TIME. They aren't. At that point in time that the cops had no way of knowing if he was suicidal, a prankster, a vandal hoping to drop a brick on traffic, a terrorist, or just a dumb teenage monkey trying to get a selfie. They had to make a call that balanced safety, convenience and police resources.
You're right, of course. I was trying to point out that thing's aren't black-and-white as simply as possible. The idea that there might be even more layers of nuance? Let's be careful not to blow people's minds up too quickly.
I'm gonna be bit harsh in my response - This is a standard logic fail and people on this site should know better by now.
When the cops chase a speeder and cause an accidental death, people decide that cop chases are the root of all traffic accidents. This only makes sense if you ignore the fact that speeders cause tons of death themselves.
When an ultra-rare adverse immunization event causes a death, people conclude immunizations are evil. Forget the fact that immunization has been absolutely proven to save more lives than..... well, pretty much anything else, with the exception of perhaps antibiotics.
Seat belts occasionally decapitate someone, so some idiots conclude that seat belts are fascism. Seat belts actually save tons of lives? Irrelevant! One guy died from them and that makes people mad.
Some teenage monkey with social media on the brain and wwwwwaaayyyy too much testosterone in his veins climbs a public bridge and launches a drone. The cops close the bridge in order to deal with it safely. Your conclusion - cops are bad! Possibility he might fall? Drop something onto a car below? Gawkers create a multicar pile-up in the middle of the bridge? Cops or safety workers might get hit by a car while dealing with the situation? Nah, all irrelevant. Most people don't like being told what to do and everyone has seen a Youtube video of some guy being abused by a cop! Screw The Man!
We're not islands. We live in large social groups. We're governed by a complex, evolving, imperfect set of rules that allow *most* of us to get along *most* of the time. Occasionally the rules are arbitrary or just plain wrong and lead to stupidity. When that happens, people need to call out the flaws in the rules so they can be modified. Cops aren't perfect, and authorities sometimes make bad calls. The cops probably called this one right. Hard truth: occasionally your freedom to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, gets curtailed in order to keep you from putting 150 people around you in danger. That's what happened here. Boo hoo.
Philosophically I support that ethos.
But only to a point. Nice to meet you, idealism. I'd like to introduce you to my friend, reality.
Huge numbers of people rely on public infrastructure. There are rules that govern how people behave in public spaces, since the actions of one person can have a bad effect on large numbers of others. An irresponsible drone operator on a bridge could easily crash a quadcopter into a car, leading to a chain of accidents that could result in death. This guy clearly needed to be arrested and slapped with a fine large enough to deter him from doing it again.
Make public rules too loose, and the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless. Make public rules too tight, and you restrict personal freedoms of movement and expression. Yes, there is a sweet spot in the middle. No, we haven't quite found it yet for drone operation. Using a public bridge like a personal jungle gym, however, is firmly in "idiot" territory.
I think you're being a tad harsh on the US. First, let me be the first to acknowledge that the US has PLENTY of problems. However, it also has one of the most dynamic, healthy, advanced economies on the planet. One of the richer ones per-capita also, though not #1. I'm firmly against forcing our system on others, but the truth is that our economic system could make a TON of other countries a LOT better off, if they would just swallow their pride and adopt it (looking at you, South America).
If the 4-day work week actually improves productivity and competitiveness, you'll see it adopted in the US fairly quickly.
With regards to unions - there are places that could benefit from more unionization, and there are other places where unions are absolutely strangling progress.
There are very, very few dependable pools of good jobs. Most job descriptions constantly change - emerging, growing, adapting, stagnating, expanding or being automated out of existence. Very few job descriptions stay constant for very long.
On the up side, this is a good thing. When society realizes that there is an unmet need for a particular set of skills, people rush/train to meet the need. High demand and a low supply of qualified people means good compensation. For a while at least.
On the down side, it can be quite a bit more brutal. When a field gets automated, some people manage to keep the few jobs that still exist, and some manage to move into another field by retraining or adapting their pre-existing skills to new conditions. However, it turns out that many people are 1) poor at adapting and 2) incapable of being trained for a job more than once in their lives. These people wind up with permanently reduced income. Understandably, they tend to be unhappy about it.
I really hope that Google employees pay attention and complete the killing of this project regardless of whatever it morphs into. They're basically saving the company from itself.
First off, I completely agree with the human-rights angle here. China isn't the worst player on the planet. Not by a long shot. However, they are far from being the best. In the long run, it's better for Google to stay away from supporting Chinese internet. History would NOT judge them kindly for taking part in something that's widely recognized as a pretty oppressive system. Their leadership is seriously blinded by short term profit if they don't see this.
However, I seriously question the possibility of ANY profit from this project, period. Who in their right mind thinks that China would turn internet search over to a non-Chinese company? really? reeeealllllly? Google executives appear to have forgotten that China is only half capitalist. The other half is iron-fisted state-directed economics. Okay, the Chinese government MIGHT be willing to cede some extreme minority of the search market to Google, but only in exchange for complete control, the source code, and every other piece of tech that Google has ever developed. In exchange for about 1% of their search market, I'm sure. What a colossally dumb idea. This is what the Google executives were making a priority? Really?
It's just one more data point showing that top executives are mostly regular or slightly-above-average schmoes who lucked into the position. They aren't geniuses and they don't have any kind of extraordinary ability. They are successful business types who were in the right place at the right time. Nothing more.
Long form journalism is still pretty good at the NYT. Other than that, it's mostly moved to the weekly-published magazines. US News and World Report. Economist. Stuff like that.
Only sometimes. Yes, sickle-cell anemia carriers get a benefit. I think that there are lots of others that don't. Tay-Sachs carriers don't get any advantage (that we've been able to identify).
Good post.
Survivability probably won't be an issue.
Natural selection will still play out in the era of gene editing. Bad edits will become glaringly obvious within a generation or two. Probably earlier. Gene edits that render people less able to have children for ANY reason will be strongly selected against the natural way. Like you said, 12-inch reproductive members on men could render them sterile, plus it might make it hard to find a partner to reproduce with. I'm not sure how many women out there actually want that... another example.... extreme intelligence could very well render a person utterly intolerable as a partner. Specific gene edits that produce unexpectedly bad results won't continue to be used by parents in the future. Nature will continue to weed out the individuals that have problems reproducing.
The gene edits that produce more fit people will render them more likely to reproduce or will be selected by more and more future parents.
It took a while but the next generation of tech companies are all grown up. Amazon moving into DC and NYC (political and financial centers of power) and now Facebook buying influence.
Don't get me wrong. It doesn't make me mad. Natural progression of a companies growth.
Completely agree. They aren't lazy at all. The numbers I've read show that they're harder working and smarter than previous generations. They use less drugs too.
And there's other angles to the story as well. With the exception of a few top performers, most millennials won't make it into better paying positions until the older generation gets too decrepit to work and has no choice but to relinquish the wheel. And when they finally do make good pay, they will discover that the entire system has been designed to deny them stable benefits. Screw pensions, invest in the market for your own damn retirement. We oldies don't owe you a thing. But hand's off OUR pensions. Those are sacred.
The irony is that closing millennials out of the pension systems means that there aren't many young people paying in. In 20 years, those pension systems will be near-bust and will have no choice but to drastically reduce benefits. At that point, a ton of old people will suffer. Funny that the millennials who are being forced to invest for retirement in market-based options will probably be mostly fine. Karma I guess.
Ah. Gotcha. Born in the 70s here. So, I don't remember a time when companies had any responsibility other than to profit.
Yup, that's a good idea, but it also creates problems that people aren't willing to solve at the moment.
Actually, I'm in exactly that retirement situation. I'm exempt from social security because I qualified for a state pension, and I'm exempt from a state pension because I was given a 403B plan plus a healthy match from the employer. My retirement is completely dependent on a private investment portfolio. The good news: that portfolio is projected to be fairly large by the time I need it. The bad news: if it fails, the only thing between me and homelessness at retirement is welfare.
I wonder how much of the pension shortfall is because of exactly people like me. Not that I had a say in it. Most old people, conservatives and hardcore free-market types absolutely hate the idea of pensions. Fox news says that pensions are filthy socialism so they have to be evil, right? They've done their best to kill benefits for young people. Of course, they protect their own pensions, but that's fake news. They've engineered the compensation system in the US so that younger professionals are pushed into investment options. Fine, but guess what? That means young people's money isn't going in to support the pension fund. Lots of retirees drawing money out, and young people actively discouraged from opting in. Strangely, the pension funds seem to be badly underfunded. Probably more fake news.
Private pensions can't die fast enough. They should be flat-out illegal. No private company has the discipline to put the needs of long-term employees first for the decades necessary to operate a pension plan. The temptation to raid the funds is too great. After the funds are depleted, the companies declare a short, clean bankruptcy and get a judge to reduce their pension obligations by some huge fraction. The companies emerge from the bankruptcy even stronger, without those pesky obligations to pay their pensioners. I know several people on private pension plans that had their benefits deeply cut by corporate legal maneuvers.
State pension plans are better, but in the US there's probably going to be a large wave of benefits-reduction as deficits get too large to sustain, and a smaller wave of straight-up state defaults.
Social security is probably the only pension system that I would trust at this point.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but my understanding is that most scammer/robocaller outfits are located overseas in *very* poor countries where there is very little prospect for actual productive work. So, people do this for a living instead and manage to scrape out a pretty decent income, but only by local standards. They wind up in the upper-middle class, but only in comparison to the rest of their neighbors in rural Ghana. So, the actual income generated by the activity is pretty low. They only need to score one hit per zillion phone calls to make it work. A tenth of a cent per call will shut them down cold. Heck, even a hundredth of a penny would probably do the trick.
Yes, there have been a few people who made serious $ through robocalling, but I think that those are the exception.
Compare this to virtually any company operating for realzies in the west. Their generated revenues will be orders of magnitude larger.
Yeah. Totally not the same as Hillary Clinton. Fox News tells us that Hillary was selling children's organs through her personal email server, and Ivanka was just doing extra credit work to end cyberbullying and world hunger. Totally different. MAGA. Lock her up. Trump tells us that federal laws don't apply to the first family anyway. Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Fake News. Liberal Media is the enemy.
I think that a minuscule charge would stop robocallers in their tracks because their profit-per-call ratio is probably crazy low. A tiny monetary cost per call would sink them while most (some?) businesses would be able to handle it.
In terms of real companies that want to call hundreds, or thousands or more people per day, my response is mostly this: too bad, you get to eat the extra costs. If you're going to burn people's time on the phone, you pay for the privilege. More than 95% of my cell phone calls are absolute junk - I would welcome putting most telephone-reliant businesses into bankruptcy. That's sort of the whole point.
Another angle - a legitimate company with a legitimate business plan can probably pass the costs on to the customers in the form of a 0.1% increase in costs. If they can't, they're probably so close to the razors edge of bankruptcy that they were headed there anyway.
There could be exemptions for things like local government announcements and emergency broadcasts.
Reverse charging is probably the ONLY thing that will prevent this. Want to call me? You need a validated credit card that deposits a tenth of a penny into my account. If this service was available, I would sign up for it in an instant. Robocalls would drop to very nearly zero and they would stay there.
My suspicion: it was all for the drama and press. The "competition" was just another form of reality entertainment to generate headlines and click counts.
They chose the government center of the country, and the financial center of the country, and divided the headquarters between the two. Yes, it's now obvious that it was the plan all along. They wanted a presence in the corridors of power, and now they have it.
But I seriously doubt they got any sweet financial deals. NYC and DC don't give out painful tax breaks to attract business. Companies come to them. Not vice versa. Not even for outfits the size of Amazon.