If the video you post is, for whatever reason, popular enough that it could bring in ad revenue that makes it profitable vs. not continuing to host and distribute it, there is absolutely no basis for them to refuse to pay you.
If it's public domain, they don't have to pay anyone. Google has just as much rights to make money from a public domain video as anyone else, if you don't like it, host it yourself.
The bald faced hypocrisy of "this work is public domain, damn Google for not paying me for it!" just discredits everyone here calling for more works to enter the public domain. Google is doing what a good publisher should do, sharing public domain work and collecting a small revenue to pay for its trouble, "eporue" on the other hand is a parasite, seeing rent on something he didn't create, like some feudal baron. Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree on one thing and one thing only, rent seeking is inherently bad, so whether you are a conservative or a socialist you should join together and pillory this leech.
Being an Uber driver isn't against the law, driving around paying passengers without a taxi license is against the law. Now, an Uber driver showing up when a ride is booked may be able to demonstrate an intent to operate as an unlicensed taxi, but the police officer can hardly catch anyone red-handed this way without entrapment. That said, Finland is not a common law jurisdiction, I'm not sure if entrapment even exists.
100' is well within the effective range of a decent shotgun firing buckshot, even at 141' (100' horizontal, 100' vertical) it should be quite lethal to a deer or human, let alone a shitty plastic drone.
His claim was that those are not weddings, but instead are other gatherings reported to be weddings after the fact for propaganda value. He also claims that higher numbers of casualties are reported, again, for propaganda value.
He does not once claim it is OK to ever bomb a Pakistani wedding.
China has quotas on all mobile connection providers, but not on home connections. Australia has them on absolutely anything, unless you pay an exorbitant price.
And the dollar won't be the world reserve currency forever.
I think you can look at anything and say that it will not be the case forever and be guaranteed to be right. However, the USD, despite its issues, is looking strong for the next few decades because the other currencies have even bigger issues than the greenback.
The Euro's speculative value is based heavily on the strength of the union, rather than the strength of the large economies backing it. No matter how strong and stable Germany and France may be, they can never wholly support the Euro's worth. Even with a strong Italy and Spain, the Euro would still be prone to shocks and fears. The Euro is held as a reserve currency, but not with the same gusto as it was 5 years ago.
Chinese Yuan RMB, is first and foremost, a controlled currency. Currency exchanges in China are limited by law and complicated to perform, leading it to have a lower volume of trade and thus lower fluidity on the foreign market than Australian/Canadian Dollars, Swiss Franks and Mexican Pesos. Beyond that, it exists to serve Chinese monetary policy, rather than American monetary policy largely existing to serve the Dollar, leading to a lot of exposure to holders of large amounts of it.
The Japanese Yen is used as a reserve currency because of its low inflation. But because of its low inflation, Japan is not growing, despite the 0.1% interest rate they have had for almost a decade now, which makes it unlikely to eclipse anyone anytime soon.
Australian dollars, Swiss Franks and Canadian Dollars, each are underpinned by economies too small and too focused on particular sectors. The only reason AUD and CHF are traded so much is that they move rapidly in a predicable direction due to certain economic conditions. It makes them suitable for a hedge in currency baskets, but not to hold the bulk of value. Besides, its not certain that there is enough of these currencies in circulation to make holding the world's reserves in it practical. Possibly Australia and Canada are just large enough to endure foreign banks either hording their currencies or creating money on paper by lending the another currency against debts in their own, but Switzerland with its half trillion GDP would surely consider this as an act of sabotage.
So what does that leave beyond USD? Pound Stirling, which is in fact a commonly held reserve currency. But the UK does not have the natural resources or the population for rapid growth, so I doubt it will overtake the US.
So what is left? Brazil, Russia and India? Well, the Ruble is a basket case, the Real has 8.5% inflation and the Rupee is in deflation at the moment, leading to concerns about money supply.
I think the USD could get a lot worse before people start thinking about getting rid of it.
I am in China and I would pay for a BBC subscription at the current UK license price, if such a thing was available. Problem is, BBC licenses content on a national basis and also makes a fortune selling national broadcast rights to its programs, so its pretty unlikely to ever happen.
Why the hell would China deliberately sabotage a foreign cable in order to knock 50,000 islanders off the 'net? That's like opening yourself up for actual diplomatic reprisals for 0 gain.
Now if you claimed they broke it by accident dredging for sand to build their their little island thing, maybe.
There is a buffet in most larger Chinese cities called "Golden Jaguar", frequented mostly by the aspirational middle class. It costs upwards of 60 USD to go there, even though most of its food tastes like rubbish. The most popular thing there is the Giant Crab, sometimes it is good, but since the guests expect to see it every time, mostly they just use any giant crab they can find, which tastes worse than those horrible crab sticks you can get... practically flavourless.
So, why eat the giant crab when it usually tastes like cornflower and has the texture of dental floss and you have to smash through a thick carapace to get at it?
Because no matter how shit a giant crab tastes, it will always be expensive. No matter how much shrimp meal you stuff into a crab shell, it will never pass off as crab. Because they spent 400 Yuan per head on a buffet and they better get the real thing!
And so it is with steel. They don't care about whether American or Chinese steel is better, they just think they are paying through the arse for your parts, they better be getting the expensive stuff.
The weight of the fridge, transferred via the rope and pully, will rip the gears clear off the end of the shaft and tear this 3D printed device apart.
I think the point of the grandparent is that the torque caused by a fridge dangling from a rope is far from extreme, a 100kg fridge on a rope wound on a 0.5m diameter capstan would exert 245Nm of torque onto the axle, less than the engine from a standard family car does before reduction gearing.
While that little hand held plastic toy might not handle the stress, if you were to scale it up or 3d print it out of metal (as some newer 3d printers can do) it would handle it easily.
The point of the 9v winching example is not that a fridge exerts a lot of torque onto the capstan, it is that a battery driven electric motor exerts so little.
I thought I hear enough of that crap in Asia. Talk about Japanese art: WWII, talk about Japanese cartoons: WWII, talk about Japanese video games: WWII, talk about modern day Japanese politics: WWII.
It's boring, it's irrelevant and it's ultimately harmful to national consciousness.
The memory of Versailles brought Hitler to power. Memories of past shames like at Gazimestan caused the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Memories of Canae caused the Third Punic War, etc.
If history has taught us anything, it is that history should only give wisdom to avoid making the mistakes of the past, not to allocate blame for the present.
100% humidity is where the partial pressure of water vapor in the air is too high for any more water to be suspended in the air. This is when water does not evaporate so sweating ceases to make you any cooler. It does not mean that there is more water around you than air. Water in a liquid state does not count as humidity anyway.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, His name was not even on the ballot in 10 states. There were only 33 states at the time so close to 1/3 of the states did not have him on the ballot and he still won. That was the key that started the whole civil war!
And did he get the required electoral collage votes to become president or not? Were the voters deprived the right to vote for Breckinridge, Bell or Douglas through Lincoln being left off the ballot?
Lincoln won fair. The Democrats killed their hope of election themselves by some of their key figures in the south carrying on in an seditious way that could not be endured by much of their voter base, splitting their vote 3 ways. The Republicans had a clear platform of a strong central government and less slavery. Those who voted them in knew what they were voting for and got it./p
I remember Sydney Morning Herald (not a semi-pornographic supermarket tabloid) published nude full body shots of her on the second page the day after she married Nicolas. Candid pics are nothing compared to what can be achieved with professional lighting and photography.
Units are complicated and many people overstate the benefits of having uniform worldwide units. If I'm choosing a unit for how I sell my goods, what's more important, that the person down the street is familiar with the unit, or somebody from Ghana will be familiar if he travels to my store.
In industry, whatever tool or system you're dealing with, you're going to either use something that is either imported or exported or has to be compatible with something that is imported or exported. Thus you are guaranteed that there will be SI units somewhere in your process and it is usually just easier to go with it for the whole process, as is done in the military, NASA, and most US engineering firms. In addition to being internationally compatible, it is also a damn lot easier to use. Sure, if you use no unit but feet, pounds and seconds in your calculation there is no unit conversion that needs to be done, but as soon as you go into the range where you might think in miles or ounces, it becomes fairly difficult to reconcile intuition with units unless you do some fiddly calculations. Whereas a native SI user knows intuitively how long a Km and mm is in the same way an American might recon a mile or an inch.
So you may say: "why don't I buy a 2 pounds of apples, then walk a mile to work where I use SI to design parts and trajectories and what not?" Problem is, if you're thinking in non SI, then non SI units tend to sneak into where they don't belong. The Mars Climate Orbiter for example fell out of the sky because Lockheed used pound-seconds instead of newton-seconds in a calculation.
Considering how much success other countries have had switching, I'm always surprised at America's feeble efforts to do so. I think it is just something to do with Americans natural paranoia about as you say a "New World Order" or whatever else that prevents it.
It does make a good case for their product. I look at most of that stuff and think "I have done that" and think how much time has been wasted diagnosing such bugs.
However, what concerns me is the potential noise that is not in the article. I am pretty sure there are a few things that it reports that are actually OK and these things weren't included. Though I admit that I don't know for certain this is the case.
You don't know what you are talking about. Drivers never quite follow the DirectX, OpenGL spec and always have some idiosyncrasies on this card or that to make them generate correct-ish results faster by cutting corners. I find my card getting completely different results to the reference implementation on a monthly basis (sometimes even missing draw calls completely or rendering with the wrong state). I found this particularly true when using DX9 style render states on DX11 class hardware. Neither AMD nor Nvidia will change a driver for you unless you can prove to them that the application is using the spec correctly and the observed results are demonstrably wrong. If you are an independent developer it's even worse since they don't make it easy to contact them.
A lot of game programmers will drop down to assembly to do some things as fast as possible.
I only use inline assembly for atomic operations myself. For inner loops, I write them in C++ and check the disassembly to confirm that the compiler did roughly what I had in mind.
Neither cache affinity nor intrinsics are as bad as you are thinking. With cache, you just arrange your data in the order it is used and generally cache will be good to you, you don't need to know the exact stride most of the time. Intrinsics mostly have an equivalent between platforms, SSE registers are 128 bits long for a reason, so it can operate on a whole row or column of a 4x4 matrix, other platforms will be based on the same requirement. If not, just use floats. Alignment is fairly consistent too, loading from register with length X should be done be done on X bit boundary. Otherwise, how would you get so many cross platform games?
Perhaps if you'd get over the idea that what's the most important to you is not what's the most important to others, you might consider that they may have left the best for last to get you to read the whole summary?
I played every single Doom, including the level packs, but only played Fallout 3, without the expansions and not even New Vegas.
That said, objectively, Fallout 4 is much more interesting than whatever it is that they are branding as "Doom". Fallout seems to be heading in a good direction, that makes people excited. Doom needs to prove itself again.
Uber has virtually no presence in China, it is being eaten alive by local competitor "Didi" who uses almost the exact same business model, but is actually able to find customers and drivers.
Uber is like "China is a big market, we must go there", but in reality, they have no idea of the realities of doing business here. They will drop huge amounts of money on advertising which will be seen by no one because they don't know how to get the word out here. Nobody in China knows Uber, nobody talks about Uber, but because they're getting scammed so hard, it looks like they are getting lots of leads.
Why are they getting gamed so hard? Because they are naive suburban whites like you who are not expecting any of this. China is not Kansas. In Kansas, Chinese restaurants all have a buffet with reasonable food for a reasonable price, but go to China and the few buffets you see are expensive and poor quality, why? Because many if not most Chinese won't eat for a day before going to the buffet and will gorge themselves silly on whatever looks expensive (crab etc.) whether or not it tastes any good. In China, if you release anything, an online services platform, an MMO, anything and you have to watch out how you are being gamed every day. You think you can give something for free online and you will find people creating thousands of accounts to harvest it. You even have to watch out for this giving virtual goods in MMOs, when giving real rides for real money you have to watch out.
The world is full of different people. The Chinese just do this because it is normal to them, they think if there is a service that you don't take advantage of fully that you are being ripped off. Didi understands it, Uber doesn't.
You don't really have to have much knowledge about anything to second guess experts in any field. Just hold to the rule that "all amazing results are caused by inaccurate measurement, poor sampling, cognitive leaps or coincidence" and you'll be right 70% of the time.
The actual breakthroughs will be so old hat by the time they have been tested properly that nobody will talk about them and you'll never eat crow.
Remember, cynicism and wisdom lead to the same result most of the time, only wisdom is so much harder to learn.
I currently am a systems engineer working specifically on email systems design.
And this makes you an authority about Weapons of Mass Destruction how? Even if you were doing email systems design for DuPont or the military, you'd have no authority to cite.
Also, if you were any good as a "systems engineer" they wouldn't have you working on email, that's a lower rung than even web backends. Whoever was responsible for cooking up Saddam's nasties in the 80s wouldn't even hire guys of your caliber as a floor manager, let alone as an engineer.
Young men would buy expensive custom sound/entertainment systems for mediocre cars when I was a lad, but they would stop well before 30. This was not a generational thing then and it isn't one now.
Young people (under 25) as a rule feel they should be provided quality entertainment while driving. Less young people (over 25) don't. I for instance have a 6 stack CD player full of shitty Chinese pop songs that I don't particularly like, but really I don't care.
Slashdot Mirror
If the video you post is, for whatever reason, popular enough that it could bring in ad revenue that makes it profitable vs. not continuing to host and distribute it, there is absolutely no basis for them to refuse to pay you.
If it's public domain, they don't have to pay anyone. Google has just as much rights to make money from a public domain video as anyone else, if you don't like it, host it yourself.
The bald faced hypocrisy of "this work is public domain, damn Google for not paying me for it!" just discredits everyone here calling for more works to enter the public domain. Google is doing what a good publisher should do, sharing public domain work and collecting a small revenue to pay for its trouble, "eporue" on the other hand is a parasite, seeing rent on something he didn't create, like some feudal baron. Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree on one thing and one thing only, rent seeking is inherently bad, so whether you are a conservative or a socialist you should join together and pillory this leech.
Being an Uber driver isn't against the law, driving around paying passengers without a taxi license is against the law. Now, an Uber driver showing up when a ride is booked may be able to demonstrate an intent to operate as an unlicensed taxi, but the police officer can hardly catch anyone red-handed this way without entrapment. That said, Finland is not a common law jurisdiction, I'm not sure if entrapment even exists.
100' is well within the effective range of a decent shotgun firing buckshot, even at 141' (100' horizontal, 100' vertical) it should be quite lethal to a deer or human, let alone a shitty plastic drone.
His claim was that those are not weddings, but instead are other gatherings reported to be weddings after the fact for propaganda value. He also claims that higher numbers of casualties are reported, again, for propaganda value.
He does not once claim it is OK to ever bomb a Pakistani wedding.
China has quotas on all mobile connection providers, but not on home connections. Australia has them on absolutely anything, unless you pay an exorbitant price.
And the dollar won't be the world reserve currency forever.
I think you can look at anything and say that it will not be the case forever and be guaranteed to be right. However, the USD, despite its issues, is looking strong for the next few decades because the other currencies have even bigger issues than the greenback.
The Euro's speculative value is based heavily on the strength of the union, rather than the strength of the large economies backing it. No matter how strong and stable Germany and France may be, they can never wholly support the Euro's worth. Even with a strong Italy and Spain, the Euro would still be prone to shocks and fears. The Euro is held as a reserve currency, but not with the same gusto as it was 5 years ago.
Chinese Yuan RMB, is first and foremost, a controlled currency. Currency exchanges in China are limited by law and complicated to perform, leading it to have a lower volume of trade and thus lower fluidity on the foreign market than Australian/Canadian Dollars, Swiss Franks and Mexican Pesos. Beyond that, it exists to serve Chinese monetary policy, rather than American monetary policy largely existing to serve the Dollar, leading to a lot of exposure to holders of large amounts of it.
The Japanese Yen is used as a reserve currency because of its low inflation. But because of its low inflation, Japan is not growing, despite the 0.1% interest rate they have had for almost a decade now, which makes it unlikely to eclipse anyone anytime soon.
Australian dollars, Swiss Franks and Canadian Dollars, each are underpinned by economies too small and too focused on particular sectors. The only reason AUD and CHF are traded so much is that they move rapidly in a predicable direction due to certain economic conditions. It makes them suitable for a hedge in currency baskets, but not to hold the bulk of value. Besides, its not certain that there is enough of these currencies in circulation to make holding the world's reserves in it practical. Possibly Australia and Canada are just large enough to endure foreign banks either hording their currencies or creating money on paper by lending the another currency against debts in their own, but Switzerland with its half trillion GDP would surely consider this as an act of sabotage.
So what does that leave beyond USD? Pound Stirling, which is in fact a commonly held reserve currency. But the UK does not have the natural resources or the population for rapid growth, so I doubt it will overtake the US.
So what is left? Brazil, Russia and India? Well, the Ruble is a basket case, the Real has 8.5% inflation and the Rupee is in deflation at the moment, leading to concerns about money supply.
I think the USD could get a lot worse before people start thinking about getting rid of it.
I am in China and I would pay for a BBC subscription at the current UK license price, if such a thing was available. Problem is, BBC licenses content on a national basis and also makes a fortune selling national broadcast rights to its programs, so its pretty unlikely to ever happen.
Why the hell would China deliberately sabotage a foreign cable in order to knock 50,000 islanders off the 'net? That's like opening yourself up for actual diplomatic reprisals for 0 gain.
Now if you claimed they broke it by accident dredging for sand to build their their little island thing, maybe.
"He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool." Brigham Young
"It's easy to maintain a healthy self esteem if you have an enormous haram and run your own religion." -Me
There is a buffet in most larger Chinese cities called "Golden Jaguar", frequented mostly by the aspirational middle class. It costs upwards of 60 USD to go there, even though most of its food tastes like rubbish. The most popular thing there is the Giant Crab, sometimes it is good, but since the guests expect to see it every time, mostly they just use any giant crab they can find, which tastes worse than those horrible crab sticks you can get... practically flavourless.
So, why eat the giant crab when it usually tastes like cornflower and has the texture of dental floss and you have to smash through a thick carapace to get at it?
Because no matter how shit a giant crab tastes, it will always be expensive. No matter how much shrimp meal you stuff into a crab shell, it will never pass off as crab. Because they spent 400 Yuan per head on a buffet and they better get the real thing!
And so it is with steel. They don't care about whether American or Chinese steel is better, they just think they are paying through the arse for your parts, they better be getting the expensive stuff.
The weight of the fridge, transferred via the rope and pully, will rip the gears clear off the end of the shaft and tear this 3D printed device apart.
I think the point of the grandparent is that the torque caused by a fridge dangling from a rope is far from extreme, a 100kg fridge on a rope wound on a 0.5m diameter capstan would exert 245Nm of torque onto the axle, less than the engine from a standard family car does before reduction gearing.
While that little hand held plastic toy might not handle the stress, if you were to scale it up or 3d print it out of metal (as some newer 3d printers can do) it would handle it easily.
The point of the 9v winching example is not that a fridge exerts a lot of torque onto the capstan, it is that a battery driven electric motor exerts so little.
I thought I hear enough of that crap in Asia. Talk about Japanese art: WWII, talk about Japanese cartoons: WWII, talk about Japanese video games: WWII, talk about modern day Japanese politics: WWII.
It's boring, it's irrelevant and it's ultimately harmful to national consciousness.
The memory of Versailles brought Hitler to power. Memories of past shames like at Gazimestan caused the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Memories of Canae caused the Third Punic War, etc.
If history has taught us anything, it is that history should only give wisdom to avoid making the mistakes of the past, not to allocate blame for the present.
100% humidity is where the partial pressure of water vapor in the air is too high for any more water to be suspended in the air. This is when water does not evaporate so sweating ceases to make you any cooler. It does not mean that there is more water around you than air. Water in a liquid state does not count as humidity anyway.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, His name was not even on the ballot in 10 states. There were only 33 states at the time so close to 1/3 of the states did not have him on the ballot and he still won. That was the key that started the whole civil war!
And did he get the required electoral collage votes to become president or not? Were the voters deprived the right to vote for Breckinridge, Bell or Douglas through Lincoln being left off the ballot?
Lincoln won fair. The Democrats killed their hope of election themselves by some of their key figures in the south carrying on in an seditious way that could not be endured by much of their voter base, splitting their vote 3 ways. The Republicans had a clear platform of a strong central government and less slavery. Those who voted them in knew what they were voting for and got it./p
I remember Sydney Morning Herald (not a semi-pornographic supermarket tabloid) published nude full body shots of her on the second page the day after she married Nicolas. Candid pics are nothing compared to what can be achieved with professional lighting and photography.
Units are complicated and many people overstate the benefits of having uniform worldwide units. If I'm choosing a unit for how I sell my goods, what's more important, that the person down the street is familiar with the unit, or somebody from Ghana will be familiar if he travels to my store.
In industry, whatever tool or system you're dealing with, you're going to either use something that is either imported or exported or has to be compatible with something that is imported or exported. Thus you are guaranteed that there will be SI units somewhere in your process and it is usually just easier to go with it for the whole process, as is done in the military, NASA, and most US engineering firms. In addition to being internationally compatible, it is also a damn lot easier to use. Sure, if you use no unit but feet, pounds and seconds in your calculation there is no unit conversion that needs to be done, but as soon as you go into the range where you might think in miles or ounces, it becomes fairly difficult to reconcile intuition with units unless you do some fiddly calculations. Whereas a native SI user knows intuitively how long a Km and mm is in the same way an American might recon a mile or an inch.
So you may say: "why don't I buy a 2 pounds of apples, then walk a mile to work where I use SI to design parts and trajectories and what not?" Problem is, if you're thinking in non SI, then non SI units tend to sneak into where they don't belong. The Mars Climate Orbiter for example fell out of the sky because Lockheed used pound-seconds instead of newton-seconds in a calculation.
Considering how much success other countries have had switching, I'm always surprised at America's feeble efforts to do so. I think it is just something to do with Americans natural paranoia about as you say a "New World Order" or whatever else that prevents it.
It does make a good case for their product. I look at most of that stuff and think "I have done that" and think how much time has been wasted diagnosing such bugs.
However, what concerns me is the potential noise that is not in the article. I am pretty sure there are a few things that it reports that are actually OK and these things weren't included. Though I admit that I don't know for certain this is the case.
You don't know what you are talking about. Drivers never quite follow the DirectX, OpenGL spec and always have some idiosyncrasies on this card or that to make them generate correct-ish results faster by cutting corners. I find my card getting completely different results to the reference implementation on a monthly basis (sometimes even missing draw calls completely or rendering with the wrong state). I found this particularly true when using DX9 style render states on DX11 class hardware. Neither AMD nor Nvidia will change a driver for you unless you can prove to them that the application is using the spec correctly and the observed results are demonstrably wrong. If you are an independent developer it's even worse since they don't make it easy to contact them.
A lot of game programmers will drop down to assembly to do some things as fast as possible.
I only use inline assembly for atomic operations myself. For inner loops, I write them in C++ and check the disassembly to confirm that the compiler did roughly what I had in mind.
Neither cache affinity nor intrinsics are as bad as you are thinking. With cache, you just arrange your data in the order it is used and generally cache will be good to you, you don't need to know the exact stride most of the time. Intrinsics mostly have an equivalent between platforms, SSE registers are 128 bits long for a reason, so it can operate on a whole row or column of a 4x4 matrix, other platforms will be based on the same requirement. If not, just use floats. Alignment is fairly consistent too, loading from register with length X should be done be done on X bit boundary. Otherwise, how would you get so many cross platform games?
Perhaps if you'd get over the idea that what's the most important to you is not what's the most important to others, you might consider that they may have left the best for last to get you to read the whole summary?
I played every single Doom, including the level packs, but only played Fallout 3, without the expansions and not even New Vegas.
That said, objectively, Fallout 4 is much more interesting than whatever it is that they are branding as "Doom". Fallout seems to be heading in a good direction, that makes people excited. Doom needs to prove itself again.
Uber has virtually no presence in China, it is being eaten alive by local competitor "Didi" who uses almost the exact same business model, but is actually able to find customers and drivers.
Uber is like "China is a big market, we must go there", but in reality, they have no idea of the realities of doing business here. They will drop huge amounts of money on advertising which will be seen by no one because they don't know how to get the word out here. Nobody in China knows Uber, nobody talks about Uber, but because they're getting scammed so hard, it looks like they are getting lots of leads.
Why are they getting gamed so hard? Because they are naive suburban whites like you who are not expecting any of this. China is not Kansas. In Kansas, Chinese restaurants all have a buffet with reasonable food for a reasonable price, but go to China and the few buffets you see are expensive and poor quality, why? Because many if not most Chinese won't eat for a day before going to the buffet and will gorge themselves silly on whatever looks expensive (crab etc.) whether or not it tastes any good. In China, if you release anything, an online services platform, an MMO, anything and you have to watch out how you are being gamed every day. You think you can give something for free online and you will find people creating thousands of accounts to harvest it. You even have to watch out for this giving virtual goods in MMOs, when giving real rides for real money you have to watch out.
The world is full of different people. The Chinese just do this because it is normal to them, they think if there is a service that you don't take advantage of fully that you are being ripped off. Didi understands it, Uber doesn't.
You don't really have to have much knowledge about anything to second guess experts in any field. Just hold to the rule that "all amazing results are caused by inaccurate measurement, poor sampling, cognitive leaps or coincidence" and you'll be right 70% of the time.
The actual breakthroughs will be so old hat by the time they have been tested properly that nobody will talk about them and you'll never eat crow.
Remember, cynicism and wisdom lead to the same result most of the time, only wisdom is so much harder to learn.
I currently am a systems engineer working specifically on email systems design.
And this makes you an authority about Weapons of Mass Destruction how? Even if you were doing email systems design for DuPont or the military, you'd have no authority to cite.
Also, if you were any good as a "systems engineer" they wouldn't have you working on email, that's a lower rung than even web backends. Whoever was responsible for cooking up Saddam's nasties in the 80s wouldn't even hire guys of your caliber as a floor manager, let alone as an engineer.
I really hoped they cleaned and cured that catskin properly and are not relying on the novelty fading before the smell sets in.
Young men would buy expensive custom sound/entertainment systems for mediocre cars when I was a lad, but they would stop well before 30. This was not a generational thing then and it isn't one now.
Young people (under 25) as a rule feel they should be provided quality entertainment while driving. Less young people (over 25) don't. I for instance have a 6 stack CD player full of shitty Chinese pop songs that I don't particularly like, but really I don't care.