Probably more akin to when the Soviets inevitably got themselves a nuclear weapon - suddenly, having dragons flying about doesn't seem as great of an idea anymore.
Isn't it the _basic_ role of the IRS to make it as simple and automated as possible ?!?
A lot of the blame can be put on Grover Norquist, the leader of Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax, small government group. One of the things his group advocates for is to make filing taxes as hard as possible. The group fears that if filing taxes is easy, then people won't resist paying them or the growth of government. For those of you who may not be aware, Norquist pushes aggressively for politicians to sign a "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" that basically fights any new taxes. For Republicans, it's almost mandatory less have one of the largest right-wing groups move against you.
One flaw with your analysis: there are almost no US companies that make similar equipment. At most, you have a Cisco or something that produces a small subsegment of the Huawei portfolio. Even the Pentagon, when talking about 5G, essentially says that the only alternatives are European suppliers like Ericsson or Nokia.
The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, "Well, I just ate the eggs!" So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I'm really fucked! Then they said they're good, they're bad, they're good, the whites are good, the yellows - make up your mind! It's breakfast I've gotta eat!
This whole thing falls apart when you ask the simple question of which "journalists" get money. Fox News? MSNBC? Intercept? Breibart? My local alternative newspaper? Who gets to choose?
This feels like the classic case of a technologist so enamored with his vision for how his creation would be used that when people don't use it as intended, he can't understand why. While I'm not one of those people who believe in the liberal arts mantra of having them involved in technological development, there is a case to be made that it helps to get a different perspective on how technology might ACTUALLY be used versus their creators' utopian vision. After all, technology rarely changes human nature, it simply amplifies it, a force multiplier. So when you create a powerful technology, why is it a surprise that people will do whatever they can to make money on it / get stuff for free, hunt for porn, politically mobilize which includes propaganda and spin, and then ultimately, draw the attention from and be regulated by the dudes with guns?
Perhaps the real reason for Trump's support (half sarcastic)? From the Smithsonian article quoted by someone else:
Today we know that changing the clocks does influence our behavior. For example, later sunset times have dramatically increased participation in afterschool sports programs and attendance at professional sports events. In 1920, The Washington Post reported that golf ball sales in 1918 – the first year of daylight saving – increased by 20 percent.
And when Congress extended daylight saving from six to seven months in 1986, the golf industry estimated that extra month was worth as much as $400 million in additional equipment sales and green fees. To this day, the Nielsen ratings for even the most popular television shows decline precipitously when we spring forward, because we go outside to enjoy the sunlight.
The same blog did a pretty good look at the business model behind the scooters. At current utilization rates, scooters need to survive at least six months for companies to recoup their costs. Clearly that's not happening now. Which means either the companies need to buy scooters at a cheaper price, build a better scooter at the same price, or somehow increase utilization per unit. I don't think they have a clear path forward with any of those, at least not enough to make the numbers work.
Except to look at individual platforms narrowly misses the bigger picture - Facebook buys up all potential competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp so that even if users think that they've left for a competitor, in reality, Facebook continues to vacuum up their data and build their profiles. Or the case with Google, where you have not just the classic products like GMail, Google Calendar, etc., but also all the infrastructure they control like Google Analytics, Android, Google AdSense, Chrome, etc. Yes, its doable even without just jumping into another ecosystem like Apple, but you give up a lot especially since so much of general society is so thoroughly embedded.
Should be important to note that this is not talking about YouTube in general but specifically a product that the company setup promising carefully curated content for children. If you're going to create a curated set of programs intentionally marketed toward children, they really should be reviewing videos before putting them on the app versus just hoping detection algorithms and self-reporting are going to catch clips spliced in. For this kind of program, once your credibility is shot, you're not going to recover anytime in the near future.
This should not be modded down, it is actually the truth. I don't think I can blame people for not being interested in Captain Marvel either... it's not a superhero name most people are familiar with.
Versus what, Guardians of the Galaxy which was almost completely unknown prior to the release of their first movie?
To me personally the golden age of air travel was the early Seventies. Everyday passengers could enjoy the mass comfort of three competing widebodies, while wealthy early adopters could go supersonic on the Concorde.
There are good ways to do subsidies and bad ways to do subsidies. The HQ2 race made that very plain. For Virginia, at least a third of their subsidies were promises for infrastructure investments (e.g. when you hit X number of jobs, we'll build a new Metro station entrance), and one of the other key investments was a new university campus. Some would argue too that the four governments funding Metro in DC finally gave the system a steady income in part to attract Amazon (critical for the health of the subway system). Those are things that while benefiting Amazon, still benefit the community, whereas most of New York's subsidies were just straight up cash. That, and Virginia paid much less per head which is an added bonus.
We do have a robust passenger rail service in the one section of the country that has sufficient density to support it (Washington DC - NYC Corridor). Even then, with tickets ranging up into the hundreds, a lot of folks still opt to drive or take buses instead. The rest of the country simply lacks the density and has such large geographical space that rail just doesn't make sense - instead, we use our robust air travel network to support it instead. So let's say you want to go from NYC to Atlanta, about 900 miles and assume you have sufficient traffic to justify building the track (which is a big if). Even a high speed rail, going at 150 mph, would take a good six hours when you could just fly for two. That six hours also assumes you've got a direct train and one that isn't slowing down and stopping in Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Richmond, and Charlotte on the way down. Also, can you imagine the cost of trying to eminent domain the land through all those major cities to build upgraded track? Not just buying it, but the environmental studies and lawsuits that will take place?
There's a right way and a wrong way to do incentives. Virginia was smart about their incentives - large amounts were deals to do additional investments in Arlington - reach X number of jobs, we'll upgrade the subway station, upgrade the light rail, etc. New York just gave them a giant bag of money.
The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.
No, the US and EU has learned from experience that Africa is a hard place to do business for a lot of reasons (corruption, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc.), which has made them cautious. The Chinese don't have experience with this, but they're quickly re-learning the colonial / imperial lessons that Western nations have learned. As the Chinese dump money into the continent, they're starting to learn that these projects aren't as simple or profitable. Raises the question of what happens when African nations start defaulting on Chinese loans? Will China be sucked into the same cycleofviolence that Western nations are engaged in to try to protect or recoup their investments?
Completely agree. We should also note that even before Amazon HQ2, Long Island City was far down the path of gentrification with rapidly rising white collar offices and luxury apartments. HQ2 merely cements a trend that has long been in progress and gives opponents of gentrification a clear, single target they can focus their wrath on in a last ditch attempt to slow the trend.
To be fair to Swift, she really does have some crazy stalkers, including people who break into her home and take naps in her living room, harass her family, and legal restraining order type of crazy. Concerts are one of the few openings they have where they can try to get close, so these systems are probably being used for that specific slice of risk. Yes, they can check at the door, but given that many have resorted to criminal actions to try and get close, it wouldn't be surprising if some tried to sneak in through other means. It is after all a private event, private venue, with video consent already given.
As someone who did move to Japan for a while I can tell you that it's not quite that simple. It depends where you are for a start, but more generally it tends to be hard at first because the language is hard and the culture is very different and many people are a bit frightened of you. Not frightened of violence of crime or anything like that, but worried that they won't be able to understand you or help you and end up being embarrassed.
Completely agree. This is true for a lot of countries, but the Japanese especially have a rigid, very particular way of doing things, and if you don't understand how that flow works, you quickly stand out as that loose bolt that bounces around inside an otherwise fine tuned, well oiled machine. They give you grace because you're a foreigner, but that still doesn't mean they don't get annoyed by you messing up their neatly defined system.
If you read the full article, they concede that this is only impacting public universities (i.e. state schools). For private universities, where some of the worst tuition bloat is happening, it's very clear that its services and admin.
The picture is a bit different at private schools, which do not receive state funding but have nonetheless seen substantial tuition increases. At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably more akin to when the Soviets inevitably got themselves a nuclear weapon - suddenly, having dragons flying about doesn't seem as great of an idea anymore.
Isn't it the _basic_ role of the IRS to make it as simple and automated as possible ?!?
A lot of the blame can be put on Grover Norquist, the leader of Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax, small government group. One of the things his group advocates for is to make filing taxes as hard as possible. The group fears that if filing taxes is easy, then people won't resist paying them or the growth of government. For those of you who may not be aware, Norquist pushes aggressively for politicians to sign a "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" that basically fights any new taxes. For Republicans, it's almost mandatory less have one of the largest right-wing groups move against you.
Actually, Al Jazeera's "sin" was simply being funded by Qatar, a state that Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and others are trying to strangle for doing business with regional nemesis Iran.
One flaw with your analysis: there are almost no US companies that make similar equipment. At most, you have a Cisco or something that produces a small subsegment of the Huawei portfolio. Even the Pentagon, when talking about 5G, essentially says that the only alternatives are European suppliers like Ericsson or Nokia.
Already being done.
The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, "Well, I just ate the eggs!" So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I'm really fucked! Then they said they're good, they're bad, they're good, the whites are good, the yellows - make up your mind! It's breakfast I've gotta eat!
Lewis Black, The White Album
This whole thing falls apart when you ask the simple question of which "journalists" get money. Fox News? MSNBC? Intercept? Breibart? My local alternative newspaper? Who gets to choose?
This feels like the classic case of a technologist so enamored with his vision for how his creation would be used that when people don't use it as intended, he can't understand why. While I'm not one of those people who believe in the liberal arts mantra of having them involved in technological development, there is a case to be made that it helps to get a different perspective on how technology might ACTUALLY be used versus their creators' utopian vision. After all, technology rarely changes human nature, it simply amplifies it, a force multiplier. So when you create a powerful technology, why is it a surprise that people will do whatever they can to make money on it / get stuff for free, hunt for porn, politically mobilize which includes propaganda and spin, and then ultimately, draw the attention from and be regulated by the dudes with guns?
Today we know that changing the clocks does influence our behavior. For example, later sunset times have dramatically increased participation in afterschool sports programs and attendance at professional sports events. In 1920, The Washington Post reported that golf ball sales in 1918 – the first year of daylight saving – increased by 20 percent.
And when Congress extended daylight saving from six to seven months in 1986, the golf industry estimated that extra month was worth as much as $400 million in additional equipment sales and green fees. To this day, the Nielsen ratings for even the most popular television shows decline precipitously when we spring forward, because we go outside to enjoy the sunlight.
The same blog did a pretty good look at the business model behind the scooters. At current utilization rates, scooters need to survive at least six months for companies to recoup their costs. Clearly that's not happening now. Which means either the companies need to buy scooters at a cheaper price, build a better scooter at the same price, or somehow increase utilization per unit. I don't think they have a clear path forward with any of those, at least not enough to make the numbers work.
Except to look at individual platforms narrowly misses the bigger picture - Facebook buys up all potential competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp so that even if users think that they've left for a competitor, in reality, Facebook continues to vacuum up their data and build their profiles. Or the case with Google, where you have not just the classic products like GMail, Google Calendar, etc., but also all the infrastructure they control like Google Analytics, Android, Google AdSense, Chrome, etc. Yes, its doable even without just jumping into another ecosystem like Apple, but you give up a lot especially since so much of general society is so thoroughly embedded.
Should be important to note that this is not talking about YouTube in general but specifically a product that the company setup promising carefully curated content for children. If you're going to create a curated set of programs intentionally marketed toward children, they really should be reviewing videos before putting them on the app versus just hoping detection algorithms and self-reporting are going to catch clips spliced in. For this kind of program, once your credibility is shot, you're not going to recover anytime in the near future.
This should not be modded down, it is actually the truth. I don't think I can blame people for not being interested in Captain Marvel either... it's not a superhero name most people are familiar with.
Versus what, Guardians of the Galaxy which was almost completely unknown prior to the release of their first movie?
To me personally the golden age of air travel was the early Seventies. Everyday passengers could enjoy the mass comfort of three competing widebodies, while wealthy early adopters could go supersonic on the Concorde.
You mean back in the 1970's when the government mandated that flights costs three to five times more in inflation adjusted dollars. You can still get that service, just fly first class which provides those same amenities at those 1970's prices. Also, those supersonic flights weren't really that comfortable - the seats were cramped, and it was super noisy - the only redeeming grace was that you saved an hour or two on your flight, and you could brag that you had the money to blow on such a "luxury."
There are good ways to do subsidies and bad ways to do subsidies. The HQ2 race made that very plain. For Virginia, at least a third of their subsidies were promises for infrastructure investments (e.g. when you hit X number of jobs, we'll build a new Metro station entrance), and one of the other key investments was a new university campus. Some would argue too that the four governments funding Metro in DC finally gave the system a steady income in part to attract Amazon (critical for the health of the subway system). Those are things that while benefiting Amazon, still benefit the community, whereas most of New York's subsidies were just straight up cash. That, and Virginia paid much less per head which is an added bonus.
We do have a robust passenger rail service in the one section of the country that has sufficient density to support it (Washington DC - NYC Corridor). Even then, with tickets ranging up into the hundreds, a lot of folks still opt to drive or take buses instead. The rest of the country simply lacks the density and has such large geographical space that rail just doesn't make sense - instead, we use our robust air travel network to support it instead. So let's say you want to go from NYC to Atlanta, about 900 miles and assume you have sufficient traffic to justify building the track (which is a big if). Even a high speed rail, going at 150 mph, would take a good six hours when you could just fly for two. That six hours also assumes you've got a direct train and one that isn't slowing down and stopping in Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Richmond, and Charlotte on the way down. Also, can you imagine the cost of trying to eminent domain the land through all those major cities to build upgraded track? Not just buying it, but the environmental studies and lawsuits that will take place?
There's a right way and a wrong way to do incentives. Virginia was smart about their incentives - large amounts were deals to do additional investments in Arlington - reach X number of jobs, we'll upgrade the subway station, upgrade the light rail, etc. New York just gave them a giant bag of money.
I think this is the most useless product I have ever heard of
This is a product that could potentially impact or even disrupt a $532B international cosmetics market with an estimated five year CAGR of 7.14% a year by creating a product that could dramatically reduce the amount of makeup needed and dramatically improve the effectiveness of its application. Clearly useless. :P
The US and EU have sucked in our dealing with Africa, mostly realizing that the area is too hospitable to colonize, they just left it alone. Not realizing there is a population of workers being under under utilized, and can be supported to be stronger economies, which in turn create more customers.
No, the US and EU has learned from experience that Africa is a hard place to do business for a lot of reasons (corruption, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc.), which has made them cautious. The Chinese don't have experience with this, but they're quickly re-learning the colonial / imperial lessons that Western nations have learned. As the Chinese dump money into the continent, they're starting to learn that these projects aren't as simple or profitable. Raises the question of what happens when African nations start defaulting on Chinese loans? Will China be sucked into the same cycle of violence that Western nations are engaged in to try to protect or recoup their investments?
Just switching one colonial master for a new one. Or sucker for elites to steal money from. Pick your interpretation.
Completely agree. We should also note that even before Amazon HQ2, Long Island City was far down the path of gentrification with rapidly rising white collar offices and luxury apartments. HQ2 merely cements a trend that has long been in progress and gives opponents of gentrification a clear, single target they can focus their wrath on in a last ditch attempt to slow the trend.
Queue liberal arts majors who are going to jump into to say how their degrees prepare students for these future jobs.
To be fair to Swift, she really does have some crazy stalkers, including people who break into her home and take naps in her living room, harass her family, and legal restraining order type of crazy. Concerts are one of the few openings they have where they can try to get close, so these systems are probably being used for that specific slice of risk. Yes, they can check at the door, but given that many have resorted to criminal actions to try and get close, it wouldn't be surprising if some tried to sneak in through other means. It is after all a private event, private venue, with video consent already given.
That said, it's still creepy, and given how the Chinese have used the system to sweep up enemies of the state, I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this.
As someone who did move to Japan for a while I can tell you that it's not quite that simple. It depends where you are for a start, but more generally it tends to be hard at first because the language is hard and the culture is very different and many people are a bit frightened of you. Not frightened of violence of crime or anything like that, but worried that they won't be able to understand you or help you and end up being embarrassed.
Completely agree. This is true for a lot of countries, but the Japanese especially have a rigid, very particular way of doing things, and if you don't understand how that flow works, you quickly stand out as that loose bolt that bounces around inside an otherwise fine tuned, well oiled machine. They give you grace because you're a foreigner, but that still doesn't mean they don't get annoyed by you messing up their neatly defined system.
The picture is a bit different at private schools, which do not receive state funding but have nonetheless seen substantial tuition increases. At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades.