We have this really old fashioned concept called journalistic standards. I know its somewhat derided in our Web 8.0 culture, but the concept still has a ton of merit. If a media organization is journalistic, it adheres to certain standards regarding factuality, impartiality and ethics. A journalistic organization can have an agenda, but it has to be open and explicit about it. On the other hand, for a media organization that isn't journalistic, it's pretty much open season in terms of what they say or who they take money from in exchange for saying something. For these organizations, honesty is optional.
Journalistic organizations are not perfect, but they are generally worthy of being trusted. All the others are, quite simply, unreliable sources of information.
Examples of journalistic organizations: most of the printed newspapers in major cities (the main ones, not the rags), US News and World Report, The Economist (has an agenda but is honest about it), NPR. There are lots of others. These are good sources of news that are generally trustworthy. Notice that most of these info sources require a subscription. That's because real journalism requires real people, doing real work, making real salaries, in order to determine what's factual and what isn't. It takes time and effort. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are getting their info from these sources because they actually cost money. NPR is free only because of the federal funding model they follow.
Examples of media organizations that are NOT journalistic: Facebook, Facechat, Twitter, Instragram, 4chan, Reddit, Slashdot. Basically all the new-gen online platforms. NBC and FOX pretend to be journalistic organizations, but they are dishonest about their agendas, which disqualifies them. Same goes for anything run by the Murdoch family. CNN gets close but doesn't quite make it either. These are NOT places to get news. They are fine for entertainment, biased commentary, and an occasional interesting discussion. But not for reliable info. Any news from these places needs to be treated with a "trust but verify, or just don't trust" mentality. Anyone who uses these as their main source of news is making a big mistake.
Nope. You're wrong. Simply, flat out, wrong. No relativism, or "what about this...". You're. Just. Wrong. The rest of the world has been following a set of free trade rules that WE (the USA) set up after WW2. News flash - when you get to write the rules of the game, you set them in your favor. The rest of the world went along because of the whole "we stand for democracy, oh and we won WW2". Let me state this again to make it totally clear to all you MAGA-I-hate-trade types. THEY have been following OUR rules for the past 75 years, and we've had it pretty good since then. Even with all the jobs and IP lost to China, Mexico and everywhere else. It's been OUR rules, and we've benefited from it. This is the system that you're trying to tear down.
Do the rules cause us to lose some jobs? Yes. But here's the catch. For every 5 jobs that we lose because of trade, WE GAIN 7 JOBS. Guess what? 7 minus 5 equals 2, which means that we have MORE jobs in this country because of trade, NOT LESS. Way, way more. Tons of extra blue collar jobs because of trade.
If the MAGA types get their way and we bomb out of a bunch of trade agreements, this process will simply reverse. 5 jobs might come home to the USA, but another 7 will evaporate. Again, basic math reveals that the overall effect is a LOSS of 2 jobs. Except this will happen a million times over (or more). And.... a lot of these lost jobs will be blue collar.
You MAGA types simply. have. it. wrong. You've been given control of an economic system that you don't really understand, and there's a chance that you're going to screw it up. The ironic thing is this - the smart money and the skilled, educated workers will be fine regardless of what you do. They will move to where the jobs are, and re-invest their money somewhere else if necessary. I bet that you've never heard of something called "capital flight". Look it up if you actually care about keeping the USA prosperous. If this current hissy-fit of anti-trade actually turns into real policy, the rural blue collar types will suffer the most. They will be poorer and weaker because of policies that they, themselves, set into place. Of course, they will find some way to blame Obama and Clinton for it.
I certainly hope that's what Google is planning. I also hope that their involvement in the China systems might give them insight into the Great Firewall that we might find useful. Maybe they just can't talk about this stuff in public. It looks bad, though.
Ultimately, I think that Google is wasting time, money and effort trying to get into China. I would be amazed, absolutely amazed, if Google cracks even 1% of the Chinese search market. No matter what they give up. No matter what they agree to. The Chinese government really, really, really, really likes to have their nationally important businesses run by Chinese.
There are a few exceptions to this. I don't really understand how American cars managed to get into China. I assume it was allowed because there are lots of other international competitors, and it's not really a point of national pride or interest. I assume that Iphones were let into China because, for a while at least, nobody made any product that even came close. But for internet search, there's already a Chinese national champion, plus it's considered a security/control issue. No way the government is going to give that up to Google.
Maybe I'm getting old, or crotchety, or cynical, but you sound like a 21 year old who has some real skills, but you think that your invulnerable (you're not) and you're probably not nearly as good as you think you are. (note - I'm not saying that I'm superior)
Skilled professionals have tried to run all sorts of anonymous stuff over the web (some lawful and some not). They generally manage until someone with real power takes notice and has the motivation to smoke them out. When that happens, their identity usually doesn't stay secret for long.
Google refuses to work with the U.S. military, but they're going all-in on China and implementing their censorship system. As a U.S. citizen, I'm starting to question their priorities.
You... you... actually think that you're anonymous on the web nowadays? Try making some sort of threat against an important figure and count the seconds that it takes for the cops to kick down your door. Doesn't matter if you actually enter your real name or not. People can find out who you are. It's just a matter of time and effort.
Your ideas about anonymity on the web are about 15 years out of date.
Oh, and just in case you actually think I'm serious - NO DO THREATEN OTHERS, IN PERSON, OVER THE WEB, OR OTHERWISE.
Well, this is gonna totally deter me. I'm a state actor or a shady company and I want to scrape Facebook for data. Unfortunately, they're making me sign a new TOS that makes me promise that I won't. What a trump card. Guess I'll just hang it up and go feed the homeless.
Second the comment about credit unions. They aren't driven by profit motive. They're legally prevented from driving hard for profits. Yeah, they can make standard banking mistakes, but they exist to provide banking services, period. They charge fees that are just barely sufficient to cover the building costs and living wages for their employees. No crazy bonuses for opening 5 credit lines for little old ladies. The executives make good money but no idiotic 50 million+ per year compensation packages.
We're members of both a credit union and a commercial bank. When I needed a car loan, I first got a quote from my CU. For comparison, I went to my local commercial bank to give them a chance. I opened the negotiations by telling them what my credit union offered and asked them to beat it. They laughed and told me to take the CU loan. Their car loans were literally 5% higher interest rate.
To the quantum researcher - how would the quantum entanglement even be an advantage?
Ok, so I can see how entanglement could avoid spoofing. Any other source of photons to the detector would be un-entangled and that could be detected. So, you can't fool the system. I'll give it that.
How could this allow analysis of target composition? It doesn't seem that any photon-material interaction would be any different, comparing standard or quantum radar.
How could this detect stealth any better than a standard radar? The reflection/absorption of a stealth craft does its job and prevents photons from getting back to the radar detector, conventional or quantum notwithstanding.
These are companies. They have to make money somehow in order to operate. Plus some amount of eventual profit if they are publicly traded. And none of the options are great. Three choices: they can charge individuals for their services (and lose users), they can sell ads (and annoy everyone), they can "monetize" the consumer by selling data (and damage trust). Or some combination of the three.
Some sub-group of users are going to be angry no matter which option they choose.
If the boss walks in at 8:30 am and decides that s/he doesn't like your goatee, you can be out the door by 9. Or, in this case, if a female employee refuses to coddle some mansplaining fanboy on the internet, and the boss thinks that she should have (after the fact)..... welp.... polish up that resume. You're gone.
This is codified into state employment laws in the form of "right-to-work" laws. 28 states have them. The other 22 states aren't that far behind. Don't let the double-speak name fool you. They aren't meant to protect employees.
However, these laws aren't really in the favor of employers either. They cut both ways. If any employer makes you sign a non-compete agreement, you can probably laugh, sign it, and then completely ignore it if the employer is so foolish as to ever bring it up again. You can quit any second you want, and the second you quit, the employer has absolutely zero hold over you. Non-competes don't hold up in court.
Hopefully this developer has the toughness to take the hit and promptly put out her resume again. If she's well-respected in her industry, she'll have another job in a few weeks tops.
Translation: "We looked at all this info carefully, and we determined that it has no value to the intelligence community, so we're deleting it".
Secondary translation: "We know that this collection program is going to leak out eventually, so we're getting ahead of the story by announcing it".
The NSA is a spy agency. Spy agencies will sometimes operate within the clear bounds of the law, sometimes they dwell in the very large grey area that sits between full legality and full criminality, and sometimes they head out into criminal territory. A good spy agency tries to remain fully lawful whenever possible and dips into the grey area only when necessary. A bad spy agency doesn't even acknowledge the boundaries and is basically just another criminal organization.
As far as spy agencies goes, the NSA is one of the good ones. They try to stay legal whenever possible, while still doing their job. I support the mission of the NSA. Super important for American security. That being said, it'll certainly bend the rules and ask for forgiveness only if someone notices.
I agree that high frequency trading appears to be an emergent parasitic strategy that should be stopped by some sort of rule set modification. Maybe someone could change my mind. Maybe there's an economic value to it, but I don't really buy the whole "we make the market more efficient" explanation. Maybe someone with an economics background could clarify.
Labor churn is currently happening, and it will for quite some time. Yes, at some point, computer and robotic systems will probably get good enough to render most human labor obsolete and surpass human mental activity at the highest levels of strategy and creativity. The uncertain question is when. Next decade? No way. In 50 years? Maaayyybeeeee but I'm very skeptical. I'm guessing more like centuries. And that's only if we don't experience planet-wide wars or major civilization setbacks.
In other words, don't expect that sweet AI-driven UBI anytime soon. Get out there and hustle!
Maybe someone can help me out here. Voicemail doesn't seem to help with phone spam much. The spam callers usually leave a voice message but it's just empty. I haven't figured out a way of filtering these out. That means that I actually have to play it to realize that it's spam. So, each spam call costs me around 20 seconds of my life in terms of opening phone, listening for a few seconds, and blocking the phone number if it's spam. There are... what..... 10 billion phone numbers in the U.S. alone? I could block spam calls for a full hour a day and not make headway. I'm pretty sure the spammers switch phone numbers on a regular basis?
Dealing with email spam is far easier. I can delete the 25 spam messages I get each day in under 15 seconds.
Agreed. It would be great to use tech and robots to shift the whole human distribution much further upwards. The distribution won't cease to exist but everyone does better.
Apple should tread very, very carefully here. One of the main reasons that I still use Apple products - I feel that Apple treats it's customers better than the other tech giants. They monetize their customers less. They hold themselves to a higher standard of service and privacy. I'm sure someone will call me a paid shill, but think about how they compare to Google, Facebook and the others. The other tech giants monetize every keystroke and mouseclick. The other tech giants make their customer info available to any ad company with a checkbook or anyone with the motivation to scrape the web. I can't really blame them. They provide services and they have to make revenue somewhere. They aren't really sneaky about what they do with their customer info. Everyone knows it and accepts it to get the freebies.
I'll go with Apple for hardware and services, and skip Facebook entirely. Unfortunately, there's no good way to get around Google and Amazon. Apple is practically the last bastion of any real level of privacy when it comes to the tech giants. Even if that level isn't all that great, at least it's something. I think that there's a grain of truth to the idea that Apple charges a premium for its hardware so it doesn't have to make money in other ways.
As far as I'm concerned, this has become the main distinction for Apple. Their product design used to be way ahead of the others, but that gap has narrowed quite a bit in the last few years. If Apple monetizes me for ad sales, it'll become just another tech company as far as I'm concerned. At that point, I'll just save the several hundred dollars and my next phone or tablet can be Android. They won't miss me, but my bank account will wind up slightly larger.
A modern brick facade is about 1 inch thick, and is only for aesthetics. Frequently, it looks like brick but if a car crashes into it, you will realize that it's some sort of hardened shell and mostly foam. It's the underlying wood/steel frame that carries the actual load. That's the part that needs to be earthquake-proof.
All the talk about this-generation being so different than that-generation - I don't buy it. For me, it just doesn't pass the smell test. People haven't changed all that much. Yes, there are slight differences. One generation fought in a huge hot war. Another generation lived through a long cold war. This other generation is living at their parents home for a few years longer on average. One generation had the internet and smart phones, another didn't. One generation gets their news and porn on a screen, another has to buy paper-based magazines and newspapers from the local convenience store. Sorry, these are small difference in the big picture.
Here's the big picture as I see it. Take "the greatest generation"..... 75 years ago, there was a fairly small class of people with good prospects, maybe 20-30% of the population. Some were born into families with money or other advantages. Some were intelligent and hard working enough to get college degrees. Most of these people did fine in the long run, although some did not and sank to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic scale. The other 70-80% of the population... their prospects were...... well, they managed to get by but it wasn't great. Most of them wound up in the lower half socioeconomically, although some of these people were success stories and made good by hustling and starting businesses, or marrying into success and money, or just being plain lucky, etc. Occasionally, people would have their circumstances altered drastically by things entirely out of their control - crime, accidents, physical health problems or mental illness. Across the spectrum, nearly everyone felt that they deserved better than their actual circumstances. Nearly everyone complained vocally about their situation and wanted to move up if possible. The underlying biological drive to find a mate and reproduce eventually forced most (but not all) young people to separate physically from their parents and establish independent lives.
Roll forward a generation. That pretty much describes the baby boomers.
Roll forward another generation. That pretty much describes Gen X.
Roll forward to the Millenials. You get the idea.
Roll forward another 200 years. I'm skeptical that fundamental human existence is going to be all that much different.
You have a good point about his biography. It could be interesting. However, I stand by the general idea that when rule passes down from father to son, it means that many better candidates were skipped over. I don't believe that leadership qualities are inherited to any significant degree. The point about dictatorship also stands. He just got himself appointed as leader-for-life. "We need to maintain stability" and "Nobody else can hold down the fort" - that's a pretty standard justification that dictators use. The reality is that dictators care first about keeping themselves in power and everything else is secondary, including the good of their country. The result: the country loses opportunity for development.
I could be wrong. Maybe Xi Jinping will turn out to be a visionary. Until about a year ago I thought that the Chinese method of governing a large country was fairly interesting, unique, and seemed to be yielding novel results (not that I ever wanted my own country to emulate them.... shudder). However, with Xi taking a life-long dictator-like position, I've largely concluded that the interesting aspects of Chinese government were transient, and that their system is stabilizing into an oligarchy with a dictatorial leader. That's not interesting at all. It means that China will top out around the level of economic and societal development that Russia currently has.
Xi Jinping's memoirs will probably be fairly uninteresting, for three reasons.
First, he inherited his leadership position. Actually, this whole generation of Chinese leaders are called "princelings" because their fathers were leaders. None of them earned their title through any sort of true merit.
Second, nothing that he's said or written has indicated any sort of really novel thinking. His famous "socialism with Chinese characteristics" that makes up the basis of his writings basically amounts to a form of hereditary, authoritatian oligarchy. Pretty blase, boring stuff that's been tried over and over again with little success.
Third, he's a dictator. Dictators are fairly one-dimensional, unimaginative types who have very little to add to the sum of humanity's achievements. They don't do their countries any good and very rarely leave any good legacy behind.
Yup. This will definitely impact sales of American parts. If this ban holds, the Chinese will work to find other suppliers outside the US, made by non-US workers and with non-US IP (if available). They will probably have to develop indigenous industries to replace the ones they are now locked out of. It will depress trade. It might increase our trade deficit or possibly increase the prices that US consumers pay for phones. It will shift even more manufacturing jobs out of the US and generally make life worse for everyone. Not that our current policy-makers actually care about the real results. They just want to show that they can stick it to the evil foreigners in some simplified way that their supporters can understand. Actual results are irrelevant.
There is another side of this, though. The anti-traders have some valid points which are usually dismissed by free-trader types. China does NOT play fair in this arena. Their companies are state-sponsored, which means that they are partially funded with tax dollars. They totally distort trade. It's hard to argue that we "might lose the Chinese market" when we only get access to a tiny fraction of it. The US gives Chinese companies WAAAAYYYY more access to their markets than they get in return.
China bends and breaks the rules of international trade when it can get away with it, and doesn't always play nice. In this current situation, the US is basically doing the same. Is it right? I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
We have this really old fashioned concept called journalistic standards. I know its somewhat derided in our Web 8.0 culture, but the concept still has a ton of merit. If a media organization is journalistic, it adheres to certain standards regarding factuality, impartiality and ethics. A journalistic organization can have an agenda, but it has to be open and explicit about it. On the other hand, for a media organization that isn't journalistic, it's pretty much open season in terms of what they say or who they take money from in exchange for saying something. For these organizations, honesty is optional.
Journalistic organizations are not perfect, but they are generally worthy of being trusted. All the others are, quite simply, unreliable sources of information.
Examples of journalistic organizations: most of the printed newspapers in major cities (the main ones, not the rags), US News and World Report, The Economist (has an agenda but is honest about it), NPR. There are lots of others. These are good sources of news that are generally trustworthy. Notice that most of these info sources require a subscription. That's because real journalism requires real people, doing real work, making real salaries, in order to determine what's factual and what isn't. It takes time and effort. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are getting their info from these sources because they actually cost money. NPR is free only because of the federal funding model they follow.
Examples of media organizations that are NOT journalistic: Facebook, Facechat, Twitter, Instragram, 4chan, Reddit, Slashdot. Basically all the new-gen online platforms. NBC and FOX pretend to be journalistic organizations, but they are dishonest about their agendas, which disqualifies them. Same goes for anything run by the Murdoch family. CNN gets close but doesn't quite make it either. These are NOT places to get news. They are fine for entertainment, biased commentary, and an occasional interesting discussion. But not for reliable info. Any news from these places needs to be treated with a "trust but verify, or just don't trust" mentality. Anyone who uses these as their main source of news is making a big mistake.
Nope. You're wrong. Simply, flat out, wrong. No relativism, or "what about this...". You're. Just. Wrong. The rest of the world has been following a set of free trade rules that WE (the USA) set up after WW2. News flash - when you get to write the rules of the game, you set them in your favor. The rest of the world went along because of the whole "we stand for democracy, oh and we won WW2". Let me state this again to make it totally clear to all you MAGA-I-hate-trade types. THEY have been following OUR rules for the past 75 years, and we've had it pretty good since then. Even with all the jobs and IP lost to China, Mexico and everywhere else. It's been OUR rules, and we've benefited from it. This is the system that you're trying to tear down.
Do the rules cause us to lose some jobs? Yes. But here's the catch. For every 5 jobs that we lose because of trade, WE GAIN 7 JOBS. Guess what? 7 minus 5 equals 2, which means that we have MORE jobs in this country because of trade, NOT LESS. Way, way more. Tons of extra blue collar jobs because of trade.
If the MAGA types get their way and we bomb out of a bunch of trade agreements, this process will simply reverse. 5 jobs might come home to the USA, but another 7 will evaporate. Again, basic math reveals that the overall effect is a LOSS of 2 jobs. Except this will happen a million times over (or more). And.... a lot of these lost jobs will be blue collar.
You MAGA types simply. have. it. wrong. You've been given control of an economic system that you don't really understand, and there's a chance that you're going to screw it up. The ironic thing is this - the smart money and the skilled, educated workers will be fine regardless of what you do. They will move to where the jobs are, and re-invest their money somewhere else if necessary. I bet that you've never heard of something called "capital flight". Look it up if you actually care about keeping the USA prosperous. If this current hissy-fit of anti-trade actually turns into real policy, the rural blue collar types will suffer the most. They will be poorer and weaker because of policies that they, themselves, set into place. Of course, they will find some way to blame Obama and Clinton for it.
I certainly hope that's what Google is planning. I also hope that their involvement in the China systems might give them insight into the Great Firewall that we might find useful. Maybe they just can't talk about this stuff in public. It looks bad, though.
Ultimately, I think that Google is wasting time, money and effort trying to get into China. I would be amazed, absolutely amazed, if Google cracks even 1% of the Chinese search market. No matter what they give up. No matter what they agree to. The Chinese government really, really, really, really likes to have their nationally important businesses run by Chinese.
There are a few exceptions to this. I don't really understand how American cars managed to get into China. I assume it was allowed because there are lots of other international competitors, and it's not really a point of national pride or interest. I assume that Iphones were let into China because, for a while at least, nobody made any product that even came close. But for internet search, there's already a Chinese national champion, plus it's considered a security/control issue. No way the government is going to give that up to Google.
Ok, you got me there. Yes, if you only need anonymity once, and are willing to make the effort, you can achieve a high probability of success :)
Maybe I'm getting old, or crotchety, or cynical, but you sound like a 21 year old who has some real skills, but you think that your invulnerable (you're not) and you're probably not nearly as good as you think you are. (note - I'm not saying that I'm superior)
Skilled professionals have tried to run all sorts of anonymous stuff over the web (some lawful and some not). They generally manage until someone with real power takes notice and has the motivation to smoke them out. When that happens, their identity usually doesn't stay secret for long.
Google refuses to work with the U.S. military, but they're going all-in on China and implementing their censorship system. As a U.S. citizen, I'm starting to question their priorities.
You... you... actually think that you're anonymous on the web nowadays? Try making some sort of threat against an important figure and count the seconds that it takes for the cops to kick down your door. Doesn't matter if you actually enter your real name or not. People can find out who you are. It's just a matter of time and effort.
Your ideas about anonymity on the web are about 15 years out of date.
Oh, and just in case you actually think I'm serious - NO DO THREATEN OTHERS, IN PERSON, OVER THE WEB, OR OTHERWISE.
Well, this is gonna totally deter me. I'm a state actor or a shady company and I want to scrape Facebook for data. Unfortunately, they're making me sign a new TOS that makes me promise that I won't. What a trump card. Guess I'll just hang it up and go feed the homeless.
Sorry, unions are a dead and dying thing. For the time being, corporations have won that fight.
Second the comment about credit unions. They aren't driven by profit motive. They're legally prevented from driving hard for profits. Yeah, they can make standard banking mistakes, but they exist to provide banking services, period. They charge fees that are just barely sufficient to cover the building costs and living wages for their employees. No crazy bonuses for opening 5 credit lines for little old ladies. The executives make good money but no idiotic 50 million+ per year compensation packages.
We're members of both a credit union and a commercial bank. When I needed a car loan, I first got a quote from my CU. For comparison, I went to my local commercial bank to give them a chance. I opened the negotiations by telling them what my credit union offered and asked them to beat it. They laughed and told me to take the CU loan. Their car loans were literally 5% higher interest rate.
To the quantum researcher - how would the quantum entanglement even be an advantage?
Ok, so I can see how entanglement could avoid spoofing. Any other source of photons to the detector would be un-entangled and that could be detected. So, you can't fool the system. I'll give it that.
How could this allow analysis of target composition? It doesn't seem that any photon-material interaction would be any different, comparing standard or quantum radar.
How could this detect stealth any better than a standard radar? The reflection/absorption of a stealth craft does its job and prevents photons from getting back to the radar detector, conventional or quantum notwithstanding.
That's going to be a real challenge.
These are companies. They have to make money somehow in order to operate. Plus some amount of eventual profit if they are publicly traded. And none of the options are great. Three choices: they can charge individuals for their services (and lose users), they can sell ads (and annoy everyone), they can "monetize" the consumer by selling data (and damage trust). Or some combination of the three.
Some sub-group of users are going to be angry no matter which option they choose.
If the boss walks in at 8:30 am and decides that s/he doesn't like your goatee, you can be out the door by 9. Or, in this case, if a female employee refuses to coddle some mansplaining fanboy on the internet, and the boss thinks that she should have (after the fact)..... welp.... polish up that resume. You're gone.
This is codified into state employment laws in the form of "right-to-work" laws. 28 states have them. The other 22 states aren't that far behind. Don't let the double-speak name fool you. They aren't meant to protect employees.
However, these laws aren't really in the favor of employers either. They cut both ways. If any employer makes you sign a non-compete agreement, you can probably laugh, sign it, and then completely ignore it if the employer is so foolish as to ever bring it up again. You can quit any second you want, and the second you quit, the employer has absolutely zero hold over you. Non-competes don't hold up in court.
Hopefully this developer has the toughness to take the hit and promptly put out her resume again. If she's well-respected in her industry, she'll have another job in a few weeks tops.
Translation: "We looked at all this info carefully, and we determined that it has no value to the intelligence community, so we're deleting it".
Secondary translation: "We know that this collection program is going to leak out eventually, so we're getting ahead of the story by announcing it".
The NSA is a spy agency. Spy agencies will sometimes operate within the clear bounds of the law, sometimes they dwell in the very large grey area that sits between full legality and full criminality, and sometimes they head out into criminal territory. A good spy agency tries to remain fully lawful whenever possible and dips into the grey area only when necessary. A bad spy agency doesn't even acknowledge the boundaries and is basically just another criminal organization.
As far as spy agencies goes, the NSA is one of the good ones. They try to stay legal whenever possible, while still doing their job. I support the mission of the NSA. Super important for American security. That being said, it'll certainly bend the rules and ask for forgiveness only if someone notices.
I agree that high frequency trading appears to be an emergent parasitic strategy that should be stopped by some sort of rule set modification. Maybe someone could change my mind. Maybe there's an economic value to it, but I don't really buy the whole "we make the market more efficient" explanation. Maybe someone with an economics background could clarify.
Bugs Bugs Bugs Bug sBugs Bugs Bugs
Labor churn is currently happening, and it will for quite some time. Yes, at some point, computer and robotic systems will probably get good enough to render most human labor obsolete and surpass human mental activity at the highest levels of strategy and creativity. The uncertain question is when. Next decade? No way. In 50 years? Maaayyybeeeee but I'm very skeptical. I'm guessing more like centuries. And that's only if we don't experience planet-wide wars or major civilization setbacks.
In other words, don't expect that sweet AI-driven UBI anytime soon. Get out there and hustle!
Maybe someone can help me out here. Voicemail doesn't seem to help with phone spam much. The spam callers usually leave a voice message but it's just empty. I haven't figured out a way of filtering these out. That means that I actually have to play it to realize that it's spam. So, each spam call costs me around 20 seconds of my life in terms of opening phone, listening for a few seconds, and blocking the phone number if it's spam. There are... what..... 10 billion phone numbers in the U.S. alone? I could block spam calls for a full hour a day and not make headway. I'm pretty sure the spammers switch phone numbers on a regular basis?
Dealing with email spam is far easier. I can delete the 25 spam messages I get each day in under 15 seconds.
Agreed. It would be great to use tech and robots to shift the whole human distribution much further upwards. The distribution won't cease to exist but everyone does better.
Apple should tread very, very carefully here. One of the main reasons that I still use Apple products - I feel that Apple treats it's customers better than the other tech giants. They monetize their customers less. They hold themselves to a higher standard of service and privacy. I'm sure someone will call me a paid shill, but think about how they compare to Google, Facebook and the others. The other tech giants monetize every keystroke and mouseclick. The other tech giants make their customer info available to any ad company with a checkbook or anyone with the motivation to scrape the web. I can't really blame them. They provide services and they have to make revenue somewhere. They aren't really sneaky about what they do with their customer info. Everyone knows it and accepts it to get the freebies.
I'll go with Apple for hardware and services, and skip Facebook entirely. Unfortunately, there's no good way to get around Google and Amazon. Apple is practically the last bastion of any real level of privacy when it comes to the tech giants. Even if that level isn't all that great, at least it's something. I think that there's a grain of truth to the idea that Apple charges a premium for its hardware so it doesn't have to make money in other ways.
As far as I'm concerned, this has become the main distinction for Apple. Their product design used to be way ahead of the others, but that gap has narrowed quite a bit in the last few years. If Apple monetizes me for ad sales, it'll become just another tech company as far as I'm concerned. At that point, I'll just save the several hundred dollars and my next phone or tablet can be Android. They won't miss me, but my bank account will wind up slightly larger.
A modern brick facade is about 1 inch thick, and is only for aesthetics. Frequently, it looks like brick but if a car crashes into it, you will realize that it's some sort of hardened shell and mostly foam. It's the underlying wood/steel frame that carries the actual load. That's the part that needs to be earthquake-proof.
All the talk about this-generation being so different than that-generation - I don't buy it. For me, it just doesn't pass the smell test. People haven't changed all that much. Yes, there are slight differences. One generation fought in a huge hot war. Another generation lived through a long cold war. This other generation is living at their parents home for a few years longer on average. One generation had the internet and smart phones, another didn't. One generation gets their news and porn on a screen, another has to buy paper-based magazines and newspapers from the local convenience store. Sorry, these are small difference in the big picture.
... their prospects were...... well, they managed to get by but it wasn't great. Most of them wound up in the lower half socioeconomically, although some of these people were success stories and made good by hustling and starting businesses, or marrying into success and money, or just being plain lucky, etc. Occasionally, people would have their circumstances altered drastically by things entirely out of their control - crime, accidents, physical health problems or mental illness. Across the spectrum, nearly everyone felt that they deserved better than their actual circumstances. Nearly everyone complained vocally about their situation and wanted to move up if possible. The underlying biological drive to find a mate and reproduce eventually forced most (but not all) young people to separate physically from their parents and establish independent lives.
Here's the big picture as I see it. Take "the greatest generation"..... 75 years ago, there was a fairly small class of people with good prospects, maybe 20-30% of the population. Some were born into families with money or other advantages. Some were intelligent and hard working enough to get college degrees. Most of these people did fine in the long run, although some did not and sank to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic scale. The other 70-80% of the population
Roll forward a generation. That pretty much describes the baby boomers.
Roll forward another generation. That pretty much describes Gen X.
Roll forward to the Millenials. You get the idea.
Roll forward another 200 years. I'm skeptical that fundamental human existence is going to be all that much different.
You have a good point about his biography. It could be interesting. However, I stand by the general idea that when rule passes down from father to son, it means that many better candidates were skipped over. I don't believe that leadership qualities are inherited to any significant degree. The point about dictatorship also stands. He just got himself appointed as leader-for-life. "We need to maintain stability" and "Nobody else can hold down the fort" - that's a pretty standard justification that dictators use. The reality is that dictators care first about keeping themselves in power and everything else is secondary, including the good of their country. The result: the country loses opportunity for development.
I could be wrong. Maybe Xi Jinping will turn out to be a visionary. Until about a year ago I thought that the Chinese method of governing a large country was fairly interesting, unique, and seemed to be yielding novel results (not that I ever wanted my own country to emulate them.... shudder). However, with Xi taking a life-long dictator-like position, I've largely concluded that the interesting aspects of Chinese government were transient, and that their system is stabilizing into an oligarchy with a dictatorial leader. That's not interesting at all. It means that China will top out around the level of economic and societal development that Russia currently has.
Xi Jinping's memoirs will probably be fairly uninteresting, for three reasons.
First, he inherited his leadership position. Actually, this whole generation of Chinese leaders are called "princelings" because their fathers were leaders. None of them earned their title through any sort of true merit.
Second, nothing that he's said or written has indicated any sort of really novel thinking. His famous "socialism with Chinese characteristics" that makes up the basis of his writings basically amounts to a form of hereditary, authoritatian oligarchy. Pretty blase, boring stuff that's been tried over and over again with little success.
Third, he's a dictator. Dictators are fairly one-dimensional, unimaginative types who have very little to add to the sum of humanity's achievements. They don't do their countries any good and very rarely leave any good legacy behind.
Yup. This will definitely impact sales of American parts. If this ban holds, the Chinese will work to find other suppliers outside the US, made by non-US workers and with non-US IP (if available). They will probably have to develop indigenous industries to replace the ones they are now locked out of. It will depress trade. It might increase our trade deficit or possibly increase the prices that US consumers pay for phones. It will shift even more manufacturing jobs out of the US and generally make life worse for everyone. Not that our current policy-makers actually care about the real results. They just want to show that they can stick it to the evil foreigners in some simplified way that their supporters can understand. Actual results are irrelevant.
There is another side of this, though. The anti-traders have some valid points which are usually dismissed by free-trader types. China does NOT play fair in this arena. Their companies are state-sponsored, which means that they are partially funded with tax dollars. They totally distort trade. It's hard to argue that we "might lose the Chinese market" when we only get access to a tiny fraction of it. The US gives Chinese companies WAAAAYYYY more access to their markets than they get in return.
China bends and breaks the rules of international trade when it can get away with it, and doesn't always play nice. In this current situation, the US is basically doing the same. Is it right? I don't know.