Still adds "sucralose", aka 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy--D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy--D-galactopyranoside.
My MOM won't even eat that stuff as it nukes her digestive system. For me, it nuked my mood regulation. I note also that it's still got trace gluten, but that will depend on where they source their oats. Some oats are very heavily contaminated, others not so much. Bob's Red Mill has good non-contaminated oats. Quaker is heavily contaminated a lot of the time: it'll vary.
It's frustrating. I would absolutely keep this stuff around for your basic 'sillycon valley style liquid lunch' (rather than booze, undistracting nutrient gruel!) but if they are so dumb they continue to use sucralose version after version, I don't know what to tell them, and it even raises questions about their other theories. How am I supposed to trust that they know what they're doing when they do stuff like this?
What's a little 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy--D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy--D-galactopyranoside between friends, right?;P
I for one am eating them as fast as I can, but think going after power stations, industry and transportation fuels is gonna be more effective.
As far as mitigation goes, increasing forest biomass is good. As far as managing what we've already got, the key factor is chaos theory, which I strongly recommend reading up on: it's fascinating.
Basically we're gonna get progressively more insane weather events because climate's a chaotic system. It's never just 'everything smoothly gets five degrees hotter', instead you get killing frosts in June and droughts that wipe out entire crops for the year or turn states into dust bowls, heat waves akin to the surface of Mars etc. More than that, you get increased chaos and violence of the system, so you want to watch for not average behaviors, but the rapidity and unpredictability of change.
Chaotic systems being what they are, and the climate being a chaotic system quite literally, what we see is the range of possible event opening up. The maximum observable behavior on a number of fronts goes way past expectation. Tornadoes, hurricanes, possibly even earthquakes as the whole thing ramps up, and of course insane brief torrential rains and such. This is what chaos looks like, and it will continue to increase faster than expected.
But that means it's no longer a market as we understand it, and no longer capitalism as it was envisioned.
When the money seeking other fortune is on a scale where it can't behave like micro-economics, it's time to observe the behaviors and ask how the system's working. Think of it as scalability issues. This has to be designed for. That's what the Fifth Silicon Valley might do, if they can be a little 'meta' about it.
We've already got many countries in the world where the capitalization of the country's private banks completely dwarfs the GDP of the actual country. When the market capitalization of companies expand to completely dwarf the GDP of all countries, the companies are now the world's government for good or ill. At that point (hopefully before that point!) you start asking what the purpose of the system is, what its dependencies are.
If market capitalization is the only thing, does it still exist in the absence of humans? If it requires humans to matter (it might not, you can have automated systems weighing the values of these things), what kind of humans does it require?
Would you say that it's a keen interest to replace systems based on human intervention, with systems based on algorithm and automation?
This can go two ways, it seems. On the one hand you can have automated systems competing to supplant entire industries while also maximizing their valuation as corporate entities: which means, taking all the money and keeping it, while putting entire industries out of work. For instance, transportation of goods. Truckers are a significant industry for employment and for the many subsystems that support them, but if you automate the whole thing with truck-sized robots (or national/global hypersonic cargo capsule networks) you can compel entire countries to turn to the automated solution by relying on its native efficiencies.
This quickly heads toward total collapse of society, as you've got very efficient goods distribution but only a few hundred kazillionaires who don't really need to buy many goods.
On the other hand, you can use the automation and efficiency gains to produce a world of leisure, and then deal with the problems of that as they arise. You have to sacrifice the score-keeping factor of capital, which also means the process of corporate valuation has to be re-thought: if nobody gets to win the grand prize that whole game changes. But, if feeding a human for a day (all agriculture, storage, foodmaking, transportation) used to cost $20 and with everything automated it costs $0.20, the nature of society changes radically. If letting a human ride any imaginable roller coaster requires the maintenance of expensive theme parks at $200 a day, but you can deliver exactly the same experience in VR for $0.002, reality starts to look like a mighty lame deal.
What I'm seeing is a keen interest to corner every possible market by automating it and starving it until it dies, in order to persuade Wall Street that you're a unicorn. This seems not quite ecologically sound, systemically, though I can't fault the accuracy of the perception. YES that's how the world works. We might want to have a look at all that. All of these systems, right down to markets and capitalism, are only human inventions
You're quite sure that turning the lights off is still up to you? An electric circuit has switches at both ends;)
I suspect you're being sarcastic but you might as well be sincere for all the difference it makes. It's the system of continually ramping up the jackpots and pay-outs that is failing. It might be a natural consequence of market capitalism where people cannot fully inform themselves about all things.
In fact, with regard to public valuation, it's impossible for people to accurately inform themselves about this because it's purely a feedback loop of what other people think, making outright lying a winning strategy (especially when combined with bailing out before the thing crashes, like Enron did).
When you couple that with a culture that mandates socializing the losses from these games, to reward the wealthy people willing to play them and encourage them to play more and harder, truthfulness becomes completely unworkable and is at a devastating disadvantage. Basically you can't do that, it's a guarantee of tanking your valuation. Even if a person believes you, they're likely to conclude that other dumb investors will be tricked into acting against you, and therefore game theory says you've already lost.
So, literally, we do need to look at rewarding failures and low achievers simply in order to keep the wheels turning and the lights on at all. Making conscious decisions to reward the big winners inevitably means rewarding only the biggest liars, plus they're typically making a cash grab and running rather than building industries for the betterment of all.
Silicon Valley doesn't EMPLOY. The highest aspiration is to have a massive server farm minded by the CEO and one hapless sysadmin, replacing worldwide industries with millions of employees. You're right: it is over and people are gradually figuring that out. Whatever does end up replacing the system won't look like Silicon Valley. It's sort of a cancerous growth, diverting the resources of market capitalism into a feedback loop.
Perhaps it's because you are looking to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice selling people an address book, to-do lists and email mass marketing, using a splashy website with big excited-looking people from stock photography. I see that
By using the Site and Application, you agree to comply with and be legally bound by the terms and conditions of these Terms of Service ("Terms"), whether or not you become a registered user of the Services.
and further that
YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT, BY ACCESSING OR USING THE SITE, APPLICATION OR SERVICES OR BY DOWNLOADING OR POSTING ANY CONTENT FROM OR ON THE SITE, VIA THE APPLICATION OR THROUGH THE SERVICES, OR BY PARTICIPATING IN THE REFERRAL PROGRAM, YOU ARE INDICATING THAT YOU HAVE READ, AND THAT YOU UNDERSTAND AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS, WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE REGISTERED WITH THE SITE AND APPLICATION. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, THEN YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ACCESS OR USE THE SITE, APPLICATION, SERVICES, OR COLLECTIVE CONTENT OR TO PARTICIPATE IN THE REFERRAL PROGRAM.
I'm looking for content-acquiring behaviors but mostly what I'm seeing is a pattern where your company connects a service with a customer and is then paid instead of paying the service provider: plus if there are disputes, the service provider can skip arbitration or legal process and make the customer pay, not them for the damages, but pay your company instead. I guess that might be a hook for service providers, especially if they intend to file fraudulent damage reports. I'm not sure what you do about things like chargebacks: in my business I've found I'm relatively helpless against the things as credit card companies will do as they please. Oh wait, I found the boilerplate:
you hereby grant to Bizlifter a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, view, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content on, through, or by means of the Site, Application and Services.
Transferable, huh? Sublicense, adapt?
Me, I just code DSP plugins for people. I don't advertise and my approach is rather the opposite of yours: far from jockeying into position for an IPO, I think mostly in terms of cash flow and living frugally so I can continue while living up to my principles. I don't need to recruit anybody and in fact it's sort of useful for me to fly under the radar: I've even been shouted out as a 'great small plugin developer' by a Massive Corporate Industry Leader (who disguises himself as another indie, but he's definitely playing your game and not mine) because I'm unthreatening, too small to be a serious rival in IPO World.
I figure if you have an Evil Hollywood CEO archetype, it's for a reason. And if there's negative GDP this quarter, it's because there are too many of you people doing what you do. You are NOT advancing human civilization. And to the extent that you're trying to paint your Bizlifter business as something Facebook/LinkedIn etc. aren't already doing, you're lying. What you're proposing is not only already happening, it may not be a great thing to be happening.
In that light, the fact that the lie of Silicon Valley is failing, is a good thing.
I do understand the defensive nature of all that legalese: it's actually dangerous for me to mouth off against you because I'm somewhat vulnerable against incurring the wrath of some internet jerkwad who'll botnet me to death or sink me with massive fraudulent sales and chargebacks. That's the internet for you. That's Silicon Valley for you. The idea is to be not only the biggest jerk on the block, but so aggressive that other sociopaths can't damage you. It doesn't leave a lot of room for little Vermont craftsmen hacker types such as myself (original context for hacker, not 'script kiddy tyra
The sad thing is, people will assume by this that people can't hear a difference between, say, speakers or playback devices. Way to just idiocrafy the world a tiny bit more, guys:P
There is one upside: the case where someone has their own expertise, which has value, but must be expressed by code to be functional.
Content-driven software. Stuff where the message or the payload is the valuable part, and the coding could be done by a variety of capable drones because it, itself, is not innovative at all.
In this case, we see a valuable thing (which may be able to stand up in a market economy on its own merits) given lower barriers to existence, by the software guys basically putting yourselves out of jobs: developing systems that can be effectively applied in generic ways by novices.
Seems, uh, generous, but knock yourselves out. I know I enjoy it when something like Unity comes out and I can play with game tech so easily, and then competing with the Unreal engine you get Unity making all their paid features also free in 5. A coder might have no idea what high dynamic range lighting is for, but somebody like me might respond, 'hey! Flares! For meeee? Thanks, anonymous coder guy who once would have justifiably charged me tens of thousands to get this working in a game, but now I can just use it and not even credit you or know who you were! This will help my idea look more impressive, assuming I have one.'
Again: seems kinda, erm, generous? But by all means, carry on. I'm not the expert coder here. I can only assume many of you guys are so totally insulated from the reality of the world that you'll blithely render your skills worthless in the 'free market' in the belief that you won't end up totally hosed by the resulting flooding of recycled crap.
And your skills might, just might, be cannibalized by somebody with some decent idea worthy of success, and you'll have helped them for free. It's nice of you though the chaos of crap-flooding is not quite as nice. But that's what you get when you wipe out all the structure of the situation and reduce it to raw chaos 'market'.
I think it's very well established what happens. As with many fields before it, you're throwing stuff open to a market in blind faith that this'll do good things. Then, social engineers take over and squeeze out the capable, and as the general populace gets more desperate for survival, they flock to the new hope in great numbers, and flood out everything, The elitism is crushed, barriers go down and you get a problem where you can't get qualified people because they can't get a foothold against the sheer numbers of crap and therefore can't survive to hone their skills.
This is not an inherent problem with democratizing stuff, it's a problem with doing that and then throwing all competitors into a maximally free market where other factors besides merit are in play.
Time ain't fungible: if you learn a tiny itty bit of everything, you'll kinda suck. If you kinda suck at social engineering and marketing, you're going to fail in a market. The person who spends WAY more of their time at that will win. If they're a Swift programmer, they will not have spent their time learning to program correctly, and their product will be junk, but since people's awareness of their product is ENTIRELY dependent on the programmer's mad social marketing skills, it will dominate and starve out other projects.
If you devote all your effort to the quality of your project, you'll leave nothing over for social engineering, and your thing will die a horrible death: what happens is people glance at it and say 'gee, that looks amazing! Since absolutely nobody is interested, they must know something I don't. I'm not interested either.'
Areas that have been profoundly affected by this whole mechanic include popular music and game programming. Look at Steam Greenlight sometime. That's your free market future, and ability to manipulate the market will always be more profitable than trying to improve quality and hoping 'the market' will notice in a world where people specialize in bending the rules.
It produces a funny sort of stratification because if you do get a foothold you can build upon that, but it takes luck to even get that (plus quite possibly a lot of sacrifice and losing money, so you will have to already be wealthy or in some kind of protective situation where you can lose money building your toehold). You harden your position as somebody the market has recognized, doing whatever you can to augment that public awareness, and this gives you the basic minimum people are unjustifiably assuming is the norm: that, in doing something, you'll be seen at all to be judged.
At that point you can act like a market element competing, but in this situation of total noise and flooding, if you don't have that there IS no path to it. In the rigidly controlled, union, regulated, gatekeeper world so many Slashdotters hate, you're blocked by gatekeepers and you know who they are and can ask their terms and negotiate: pay, study for accreditations, make friends, whatever. In the free market world the gatekeeper is Brownian motion, and you can't negotiate with a force of nature or a law of statistics.
So no, 'everyone able to build amazing apps with Swift' is not what we really need. It seems populist but it's based on an underlying fantasy of removing all gatekeepers and letting 'the market' sort it out, and the market will pick social engineers and put up barriers more daunting than anything human gatekeepers can muster.
This is a very silly objection, and I'll tell you why.
I routinely start watching a set of Minecraft youtubers for a thing called 'Mindcrack UHC'. I know the playstyles of many of the players, what can be expected of them, even some of the unusual team-ups worthy of a pro wrestling storyline (hi, Vechs/BTC/Nebs!).
They are BOXES running around. I have no idea what they actually look like, nor am I really interested.
Video games have the capacity to become the athletics version of Asian avatar popstars: it helps if there's character customization, but even so, if you want musclebound superheroes doing superhuman feats, reality can't possibly live up to computer generation. You'll find in movies now the big stars and their action scenes are largely videogames, and nobody complains and that's not even interactive. How much cooler is it, if the superhuman avatars are actually being controlled by dedicated human athletes straining their abilities to the limit to prevail? If it's not pre-scripted?
Imagine competitive Rubik's Cube solving to make it more understandable. That clearly involves intense physical dexterity, but also extremely rapid situational analysis and execution. It might not look as entertaining as football because it's way harder to know where the athlete is going with their cube (in football, you can see what's intended from the outside) but it's more or less the same type of thing.
Same with competitive gaming, with the advantage that if you know the game you can (like football) follow along and imagine how things might be executed, and see whether the players execute them. It's not 'can he run faster than the linebacker chasing him' but 'can he dodge this attack or pull off this complicated move'.
E-games are going to have to become more 'readable' to outsiders to go properly mainstream, but there's no conceptual problem with it. It's purely a matter of how audience-friendly you can make the concept of 'challenge' when it's a matter of situational analysis, threat and reaction. One awkward bit is that videogames can move too fast for the layman: but in the Michael Bay era, that's being steadily reinterpreted, people expect more demanding visual data.
At that point it becomes a prerequisite: you gotta be a great gamer, know your stuff, practice AND have ADHD. So much of it that you function normally on bucketloads of Adderall. You're the twitchy equivalent of a Kenyan long-distance runner with the toothpicks for legs, you've reached your final form;)
It's horrible but it's also interesting. I've studied this stuff a bit. It doesn't bother me when you have categorical advantage but it gets more worrying when part of the 'qualification' is a dark history that leaves the hapless 'competer' human wreckage with nothing to live for but the will to win, forever unsatisfied unless they are crushing their opponents. Yet that's part of the formula, and a surprising amount of sports and entertainment is the wrangling of these freakish entities and trying to keep them from wrecking their teams, their bands, their lives etc.
You can't get away from this in any competitive sphere including life itself: when it comes down to the cult of the individual, it is ALWAYS possible to guarantee victory if you're okay with it being Pyrhhic. A sense of self-preservation or honoring the sport/context/environment is a handicap, and so you get Lance Armstrong every time, to a greater or lesser extent. That's what winning IS.
Interesting expressing these thoughts for the first time on a site where (a) there's huge respect for the cult of the winner and (b) there's also an entire subculture of shared cooperating, open source, and truly free software that is literally the opposite approach: trying to tear down all barriers to produce a context where anything is possible to anyone, without obstacle.
All this plus drones flown by arrogant fools to get impressive camera footage will actively try to be IN the vicinity of anything on the scene. If there is an aircraft trying to make a firefighting pass, every single drone being flown with this agenda will try to get NEARER to the plane than all the other drones to ensure there aren't extra drones in the shot.
They'll not only try to get in the way but they'll try to get closer than the other drones for bragging rights. It's certainly not 'cool' to be the drone farthest away from the shot. Hence, human intervention actively making the problem worse.
Also bear in mind what a drone is. These five drones were competing with each other to get better footage. Dramatic close footage of helicopters is clearly good footage, and the kind of person who fights to get camera drones into the middle of a situation like this is the kind of person who'd try to get the helicopters and everything else in the shot good and tight. Close-up of the helicopter dumping water? Score!
These aren't stray animals, they are provably human beings on the scene somewhere, putting themselves and others in danger in order to be annoying paparazzi and excessively-wealthy-Silicon-valley-cocks AT THE SAME TIME.
By all means, shoot the drones on sight. No human paparazzi need be harmed, unless they croak from getting in the way of a massive fire on purpose.
I'm alarmed and impressed that they managed to get FIVE competing drones, all getting in the way as they tried to be 21st century paparazzi-by-wire. Literally, five rich people were doing this at the same time? What were they, waiting for the rich drone pilot bat-signal?
"DANGER on the freeway. Quick! Get in the way, and film it to post on rich douches of Instagram!"
Indeed. I think a fair number of people making the argument,
"This should be operated with minimal rules so the market can decide how best to handle things! Bad solutions will fail and the best solution will prevail!"
are shall we say innocent of history. Typically a system like the NYC medallion system exists because at some previous time, the looser 'freer' system was in place, and it persistently led to catastrophic results. The 30,000 cabs on the street fighting for fares was not an accident, it was the natural consequence of New York City being New York City. The more repressive and thoroughly unfree system that arose, evolved out of the peculiar challenges of New York City. One of them is extreme wealth, which drives the unaffordable cost of the medallions.
That very thing illustrates the problem: the market of NYC tries to put so many cabs on the road that the roads cease to work for anybody, including emergency vehicles, garbage collection and so on. It's a bit like a good citybuilder game: you can get situations where things go out of balance and snowballing consequences produce a massive die-off and the destruction of your city.
That depends on the extent to which cities and road systems (something created and designed by people, except in the case of Boston which was designed by cows) serve a social function as an indispensable part of that society.
If democratic society functions completely the same no matter what transportation does, then sure. Transportation can do what it likes as it doesn't matter.
If systems like cities absolutely require a transportation infrastructure, then society itself has a vested interest in dictating how that can go. It doesn't mean you have to have a state transportation system (though that does work). You can privatize it. Like taxi companies! Amazing how those can act with their own interests (even to the point of angering slashdotters) while also serving the needs and requirements of the larger society. You could nationalize it: you could nationalize Uber! But we typically don't, and so they function as independent entities but serve the requirements of the larger system, which must have some form of transportation to exist.
There's no special reason why 'a company arranging for rides between private persons' gets to step outside that overall context. If they are benefiting the overall society, we adapt to include them. If they can be recognized as a thing like a pyramid scheme, where it appears desirable but carries inevitable bad consequences that come out of what the system itself means, then we as a society get to say 'never mind the bait, this is forbidden because we don't like the bad consequences'.
Heck, net neutrality is an instance of society saying 'yes, fully enabling the freemarket will give companies more ability to drive profit, but we don't like the inefficiency of maximizing for THAT result and we don't like the bad consequences'.
Uber greases the wheels for certain high-quality easy transactions in transportation-heavy areas serving rich people wanting convenience and servitude, while turning over service of undesirable areas and situations to raw freemarket mathematics. Society is allowed to decide there are situations not subject to 'what the market will bear', and taxi companies are held to that on pain of losing permission to exist.
Uber wants to operate purely on freemarket principles and allow the individual drivers to fail this test with the buck stopping there. No larger global consequences, they just keep the profit and socialize the risk. Part of the system is churning through drivers aggressively with new ones entering the system, so by definition it requires subjecting riders to failing drivers at no penalty to Uber: it becomes the rider's problem to soak up the damage of the failed transaction and 'rate' the driver to get them fired (which I don't think is a guarantee? Depends on how many more drivers want to apply, surely). The rider takes on the burden of becoming the city's transportation police and justice system, actively criticizing the Uber driver and issuing rulings like a judge on which hapless schlub with a cellphone lives or dies in the Uber system. The rider gets a new job, which they must take seriously or the system breaks down and bad drivers continue to operate.
They're not paid for this service. The rider PAYS to perform this service. They are inspecting the meat by eating it, they are issuing licenses for surgery AFTER the operation takes place. (certainly loss of limb or death can be a consequence either from surgery or vehicle travel, licensed or unlicensed)
That's why 'a company arranging for rides' exists in a context. It's possible for a company to arrange for mob hits between private individuals, and that would still be illegal because the range of underlying behavior being 'arranged' contains societally undesirable things. Same with Uber.
I think you've slightly misunderstood one small detail.
Uber certainly does not add 'actually showing up' because of the ratings system. It adds 'firing drivers' because of the ratings system, which one might call 'churn'.
If you figure Uber's normal operation is stable employment, I think you're not quite understanding what Uber is: it's all about churn. There's nothing persistent about it, it's a 'cloud' of transportation. (if they start using that, especially in court, I want them to pay me)
As such, by design it must sometimes fail you as a user because in any given situation you must calculate the odds of your request being outside the range of accepted requests for that instance of 'driver'. You know nothing about the driver, because people are a wildly varying quantity and Uber is neither equipped for, nor interested in, guaranteeing driver behavior. The driver is a cloud driver and could be anything, if they are wildly inappropriate it's a question of how quickly the ratings gets 'em and Uber blackballs 'em (assuming that even happens, maybe they can just reapply under another name?)
The one thing you are guaranteed is a car that LOOKS good, and is not older than a set year. That's what Uber can draw a sharp line on, and they have the power to simply deny drivers with the wrong car. They're not set up to reject drivers as drivers, because the driver is the cloud and there are always more total strangers offering to drive for Uber. The faster they reject half-decent drivers who don't make ratings goals, the faster they can take in new drivers across the full range from great to miserable or even dangerous/criminal.
So it does NOT add 'actually showing up'. It means 'if they didn't show up, you get to give a resounding 'boooo!' to one packet of that cloud, which may never even know who you were. A guy fails that hard, he's probably failing for more customers than you. Or he got a flat or something? His tires looked good, but they were factory seconds. He cut corners and his vehicle broke: bad rating, he and his cutrate car are gone, and you get nothing. Other people's use of the ratings system did not protect you because it is *not* being applied against a static collection of drivers, as a taxicab company would be. It's being applied against a cloud and all the new drivers constantly coming in by design, are drivers you have no information about whatever.
Can I put it in computer terms? Uber is in permanent alpha. You are always paying for dailies because you're the test case. If, in the 'pissy obstructing of traffic case' something happens in the city that grossly affects transportation systems and they choose to fight back and get their way/protect their profit margin/what have you, the taxi system gets in your face and strikes and obstructs traffic (I assume that's what you mean?). Uber just vanishes, under those circumstances. It's gone, you can't get a ride at all. Not a strike, not a thing that can correct the underlying problem harming transportation, it just politely disappears and you have no rides left, period.
Slashdot Mirror
Still adds "sucralose", aka 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy--D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy--D-galactopyranoside.
My MOM won't even eat that stuff as it nukes her digestive system. For me, it nuked my mood regulation. I note also that it's still got trace gluten, but that will depend on where they source their oats. Some oats are very heavily contaminated, others not so much. Bob's Red Mill has good non-contaminated oats. Quaker is heavily contaminated a lot of the time: it'll vary.
It's frustrating. I would absolutely keep this stuff around for your basic 'sillycon valley style liquid lunch' (rather than booze, undistracting nutrient gruel!) but if they are so dumb they continue to use sucralose version after version, I don't know what to tell them, and it even raises questions about their other theories. How am I supposed to trust that they know what they're doing when they do stuff like this?
What's a little 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy--D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy--D-galactopyranoside between friends, right? ;P
I for one am eating them as fast as I can, but think going after power stations, industry and transportation fuels is gonna be more effective.
As far as mitigation goes, increasing forest biomass is good. As far as managing what we've already got, the key factor is chaos theory, which I strongly recommend reading up on: it's fascinating.
Basically we're gonna get progressively more insane weather events because climate's a chaotic system. It's never just 'everything smoothly gets five degrees hotter', instead you get killing frosts in June and droughts that wipe out entire crops for the year or turn states into dust bowls, heat waves akin to the surface of Mars etc. More than that, you get increased chaos and violence of the system, so you want to watch for not average behaviors, but the rapidity and unpredictability of change.
Chaotic systems being what they are, and the climate being a chaotic system quite literally, what we see is the range of possible event opening up. The maximum observable behavior on a number of fronts goes way past expectation. Tornadoes, hurricanes, possibly even earthquakes as the whole thing ramps up, and of course insane brief torrential rains and such. This is what chaos looks like, and it will continue to increase faster than expected.
Next, Minecraft by the hour!
But that means it's no longer a market as we understand it, and no longer capitalism as it was envisioned.
When the money seeking other fortune is on a scale where it can't behave like micro-economics, it's time to observe the behaviors and ask how the system's working. Think of it as scalability issues. This has to be designed for. That's what the Fifth Silicon Valley might do, if they can be a little 'meta' about it.
We've already got many countries in the world where the capitalization of the country's private banks completely dwarfs the GDP of the actual country. When the market capitalization of companies expand to completely dwarf the GDP of all countries, the companies are now the world's government for good or ill. At that point (hopefully before that point!) you start asking what the purpose of the system is, what its dependencies are.
If market capitalization is the only thing, does it still exist in the absence of humans? If it requires humans to matter (it might not, you can have automated systems weighing the values of these things), what kind of humans does it require?
Would you say that it's a keen interest to replace systems based on human intervention, with systems based on algorithm and automation?
This can go two ways, it seems. On the one hand you can have automated systems competing to supplant entire industries while also maximizing their valuation as corporate entities: which means, taking all the money and keeping it, while putting entire industries out of work. For instance, transportation of goods. Truckers are a significant industry for employment and for the many subsystems that support them, but if you automate the whole thing with truck-sized robots (or national/global hypersonic cargo capsule networks) you can compel entire countries to turn to the automated solution by relying on its native efficiencies.
This quickly heads toward total collapse of society, as you've got very efficient goods distribution but only a few hundred kazillionaires who don't really need to buy many goods.
On the other hand, you can use the automation and efficiency gains to produce a world of leisure, and then deal with the problems of that as they arise. You have to sacrifice the score-keeping factor of capital, which also means the process of corporate valuation has to be re-thought: if nobody gets to win the grand prize that whole game changes. But, if feeding a human for a day (all agriculture, storage, foodmaking, transportation) used to cost $20 and with everything automated it costs $0.20, the nature of society changes radically. If letting a human ride any imaginable roller coaster requires the maintenance of expensive theme parks at $200 a day, but you can deliver exactly the same experience in VR for $0.002, reality starts to look like a mighty lame deal.
What I'm seeing is a keen interest to corner every possible market by automating it and starving it until it dies, in order to persuade Wall Street that you're a unicorn. This seems not quite ecologically sound, systemically, though I can't fault the accuracy of the perception. YES that's how the world works. We might want to have a look at all that. All of these systems, right down to markets and capitalism, are only human inventions
You're quite sure that turning the lights off is still up to you? An electric circuit has switches at both ends ;)
I suspect you're being sarcastic but you might as well be sincere for all the difference it makes. It's the system of continually ramping up the jackpots and pay-outs that is failing. It might be a natural consequence of market capitalism where people cannot fully inform themselves about all things.
In fact, with regard to public valuation, it's impossible for people to accurately inform themselves about this because it's purely a feedback loop of what other people think, making outright lying a winning strategy (especially when combined with bailing out before the thing crashes, like Enron did).
When you couple that with a culture that mandates socializing the losses from these games, to reward the wealthy people willing to play them and encourage them to play more and harder, truthfulness becomes completely unworkable and is at a devastating disadvantage. Basically you can't do that, it's a guarantee of tanking your valuation. Even if a person believes you, they're likely to conclude that other dumb investors will be tricked into acting against you, and therefore game theory says you've already lost.
So, literally, we do need to look at rewarding failures and low achievers simply in order to keep the wheels turning and the lights on at all. Making conscious decisions to reward the big winners inevitably means rewarding only the biggest liars, plus they're typically making a cash grab and running rather than building industries for the betterment of all.
Silicon Valley doesn't EMPLOY. The highest aspiration is to have a massive server farm minded by the CEO and one hapless sysadmin, replacing worldwide industries with millions of employees. You're right: it is over and people are gradually figuring that out. Whatever does end up replacing the system won't look like Silicon Valley. It's sort of a cancerous growth, diverting the resources of market capitalism into a feedback loop.
Perhaps it's because you are looking to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice selling people an address book, to-do lists and email mass marketing, using a splashy website with big excited-looking people from stock photography. I see that
By using the Site and Application, you agree to comply with and be legally bound by the terms and conditions of these Terms of Service ("Terms"), whether or not you become a registered user of the Services.
and further that
YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT, BY ACCESSING OR USING THE SITE, APPLICATION OR SERVICES OR BY DOWNLOADING OR POSTING ANY CONTENT FROM OR ON THE SITE, VIA THE APPLICATION OR THROUGH THE SERVICES, OR BY PARTICIPATING IN THE REFERRAL PROGRAM, YOU ARE INDICATING THAT YOU HAVE READ, AND THAT YOU UNDERSTAND AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS, WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE REGISTERED WITH THE SITE AND APPLICATION. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, THEN YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ACCESS OR USE THE SITE, APPLICATION, SERVICES, OR COLLECTIVE CONTENT OR TO PARTICIPATE IN THE REFERRAL PROGRAM.
I'm looking for content-acquiring behaviors but mostly what I'm seeing is a pattern where your company connects a service with a customer and is then paid instead of paying the service provider: plus if there are disputes, the service provider can skip arbitration or legal process and make the customer pay, not them for the damages, but pay your company instead. I guess that might be a hook for service providers, especially if they intend to file fraudulent damage reports. I'm not sure what you do about things like chargebacks: in my business I've found I'm relatively helpless against the things as credit card companies will do as they please.
Oh wait, I found the boilerplate:
you hereby grant to Bizlifter a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, view, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content on, through, or by means of the Site, Application and Services.
Transferable, huh? Sublicense, adapt?
Me, I just code DSP plugins for people. I don't advertise and my approach is rather the opposite of yours: far from jockeying into position for an IPO, I think mostly in terms of cash flow and living frugally so I can continue while living up to my principles. I don't need to recruit anybody and in fact it's sort of useful for me to fly under the radar: I've even been shouted out as a 'great small plugin developer' by a Massive Corporate Industry Leader (who disguises himself as another indie, but he's definitely playing your game and not mine) because I'm unthreatening, too small to be a serious rival in IPO World.
I figure if you have an Evil Hollywood CEO archetype, it's for a reason. And if there's negative GDP this quarter, it's because there are too many of you people doing what you do. You are NOT advancing human civilization. And to the extent that you're trying to paint your Bizlifter business as something Facebook/LinkedIn etc. aren't already doing, you're lying. What you're proposing is not only already happening, it may not be a great thing to be happening.
In that light, the fact that the lie of Silicon Valley is failing, is a good thing.
I do understand the defensive nature of all that legalese: it's actually dangerous for me to mouth off against you because I'm somewhat vulnerable against incurring the wrath of some internet jerkwad who'll botnet me to death or sink me with massive fraudulent sales and chargebacks. That's the internet for you. That's Silicon Valley for you. The idea is to be not only the biggest jerk on the block, but so aggressive that other sociopaths can't damage you. It doesn't leave a lot of room for little Vermont craftsmen hacker types such as myself (original context for hacker, not 'script kiddy tyra
ETHERNET cable?
Oh come on.
The sad thing is, people will assume by this that people can't hear a difference between, say, speakers or playback devices. Way to just idiocrafy the world a tiny bit more, guys :P
I initially read that as
I have erroneous faith in Google and Googlers doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data I share with them
Heh.
There is one upside: the case where someone has their own expertise, which has value, but must be expressed by code to be functional.
Content-driven software. Stuff where the message or the payload is the valuable part, and the coding could be done by a variety of capable drones because it, itself, is not innovative at all.
In this case, we see a valuable thing (which may be able to stand up in a market economy on its own merits) given lower barriers to existence, by the software guys basically putting yourselves out of jobs: developing systems that can be effectively applied in generic ways by novices.
Seems, uh, generous, but knock yourselves out. I know I enjoy it when something like Unity comes out and I can play with game tech so easily, and then competing with the Unreal engine you get Unity making all their paid features also free in 5. A coder might have no idea what high dynamic range lighting is for, but somebody like me might respond, 'hey! Flares! For meeee? Thanks, anonymous coder guy who once would have justifiably charged me tens of thousands to get this working in a game, but now I can just use it and not even credit you or know who you were! This will help my idea look more impressive, assuming I have one.'
Again: seems kinda, erm, generous? But by all means, carry on. I'm not the expert coder here. I can only assume many of you guys are so totally insulated from the reality of the world that you'll blithely render your skills worthless in the 'free market' in the belief that you won't end up totally hosed by the resulting flooding of recycled crap.
And your skills might, just might, be cannibalized by somebody with some decent idea worthy of success, and you'll have helped them for free. It's nice of you though the chaos of crap-flooding is not quite as nice. But that's what you get when you wipe out all the structure of the situation and reduce it to raw chaos 'market'.
I think it's very well established what happens. As with many fields before it, you're throwing stuff open to a market in blind faith that this'll do good things. Then, social engineers take over and squeeze out the capable, and as the general populace gets more desperate for survival, they flock to the new hope in great numbers, and flood out everything, The elitism is crushed, barriers go down and you get a problem where you can't get qualified people because they can't get a foothold against the sheer numbers of crap and therefore can't survive to hone their skills.
This is not an inherent problem with democratizing stuff, it's a problem with doing that and then throwing all competitors into a maximally free market where other factors besides merit are in play.
Time ain't fungible: if you learn a tiny itty bit of everything, you'll kinda suck. If you kinda suck at social engineering and marketing, you're going to fail in a market. The person who spends WAY more of their time at that will win. If they're a Swift programmer, they will not have spent their time learning to program correctly, and their product will be junk, but since people's awareness of their product is ENTIRELY dependent on the programmer's mad social marketing skills, it will dominate and starve out other projects.
If you devote all your effort to the quality of your project, you'll leave nothing over for social engineering, and your thing will die a horrible death: what happens is people glance at it and say 'gee, that looks amazing! Since absolutely nobody is interested, they must know something I don't. I'm not interested either.'
Areas that have been profoundly affected by this whole mechanic include popular music and game programming. Look at Steam Greenlight sometime. That's your free market future, and ability to manipulate the market will always be more profitable than trying to improve quality and hoping 'the market' will notice in a world where people specialize in bending the rules.
It produces a funny sort of stratification because if you do get a foothold you can build upon that, but it takes luck to even get that (plus quite possibly a lot of sacrifice and losing money, so you will have to already be wealthy or in some kind of protective situation where you can lose money building your toehold). You harden your position as somebody the market has recognized, doing whatever you can to augment that public awareness, and this gives you the basic minimum people are unjustifiably assuming is the norm: that, in doing something, you'll be seen at all to be judged.
At that point you can act like a market element competing, but in this situation of total noise and flooding, if you don't have that there IS no path to it. In the rigidly controlled, union, regulated, gatekeeper world so many Slashdotters hate, you're blocked by gatekeepers and you know who they are and can ask their terms and negotiate: pay, study for accreditations, make friends, whatever. In the free market world the gatekeeper is Brownian motion, and you can't negotiate with a force of nature or a law of statistics.
So no, 'everyone able to build amazing apps with Swift' is not what we really need. It seems populist but it's based on an underlying fantasy of removing all gatekeepers and letting 'the market' sort it out, and the market will pick social engineers and put up barriers more daunting than anything human gatekeepers can muster.
'back into' oligarchy? Because somehow the pitifully small and ineffective MPAA is the bogeyman here?
Funny how Google can't be oligarchy. Compared the market capitalization lately?
This is a very silly objection, and I'll tell you why.
I routinely start watching a set of Minecraft youtubers for a thing called 'Mindcrack UHC'. I know the playstyles of many of the players, what can be expected of them, even some of the unusual team-ups worthy of a pro wrestling storyline (hi, Vechs/BTC/Nebs!).
They are BOXES running around. I have no idea what they actually look like, nor am I really interested.
Video games have the capacity to become the athletics version of Asian avatar popstars: it helps if there's character customization, but even so, if you want musclebound superheroes doing superhuman feats, reality can't possibly live up to computer generation. You'll find in movies now the big stars and their action scenes are largely videogames, and nobody complains and that's not even interactive. How much cooler is it, if the superhuman avatars are actually being controlled by dedicated human athletes straining their abilities to the limit to prevail? If it's not pre-scripted?
Imagine competitive Rubik's Cube solving to make it more understandable. That clearly involves intense physical dexterity, but also extremely rapid situational analysis and execution. It might not look as entertaining as football because it's way harder to know where the athlete is going with their cube (in football, you can see what's intended from the outside) but it's more or less the same type of thing.
Same with competitive gaming, with the advantage that if you know the game you can (like football) follow along and imagine how things might be executed, and see whether the players execute them. It's not 'can he run faster than the linebacker chasing him' but 'can he dodge this attack or pull off this complicated move'.
E-games are going to have to become more 'readable' to outsiders to go properly mainstream, but there's no conceptual problem with it. It's purely a matter of how audience-friendly you can make the concept of 'challenge' when it's a matter of situational analysis, threat and reaction. One awkward bit is that videogames can move too fast for the layman: but in the Michael Bay era, that's being steadily reinterpreted, people expect more demanding visual data.
Whaddya mean 'if'? ;)
At that point it becomes a prerequisite: you gotta be a great gamer, know your stuff, practice AND have ADHD. So much of it that you function normally on bucketloads of Adderall. You're the twitchy equivalent of a Kenyan long-distance runner with the toothpicks for legs, you've reached your final form ;)
It's horrible but it's also interesting. I've studied this stuff a bit. It doesn't bother me when you have categorical advantage but it gets more worrying when part of the 'qualification' is a dark history that leaves the hapless 'competer' human wreckage with nothing to live for but the will to win, forever unsatisfied unless they are crushing their opponents. Yet that's part of the formula, and a surprising amount of sports and entertainment is the wrangling of these freakish entities and trying to keep them from wrecking their teams, their bands, their lives etc.
You can't get away from this in any competitive sphere including life itself: when it comes down to the cult of the individual, it is ALWAYS possible to guarantee victory if you're okay with it being Pyrhhic. A sense of self-preservation or honoring the sport/context/environment is a handicap, and so you get Lance Armstrong every time, to a greater or lesser extent. That's what winning IS.
Interesting expressing these thoughts for the first time on a site where (a) there's huge respect for the cult of the winner and (b) there's also an entire subculture of shared cooperating, open source, and truly free software that is literally the opposite approach: trying to tear down all barriers to produce a context where anything is possible to anyone, without obstacle.
Nah. They give those things to any bozo these days ;)
Remember, your autonomous roving drone with a Beretta and solenoid is not an automatic weapon unless you code the trigger as a do/while loop!
Unroll the loop, so it counts as ten individual fire events that just happen to trigger really really fast ;P
Welp, now those firefighting helicopters are in REAL trouble
All this plus drones flown by arrogant fools to get impressive camera footage will actively try to be IN the vicinity of anything on the scene. If there is an aircraft trying to make a firefighting pass, every single drone being flown with this agenda will try to get NEARER to the plane than all the other drones to ensure there aren't extra drones in the shot.
They'll not only try to get in the way but they'll try to get closer than the other drones for bragging rights. It's certainly not 'cool' to be the drone farthest away from the shot. Hence, human intervention actively making the problem worse.
Also bear in mind what a drone is. These five drones were competing with each other to get better footage. Dramatic close footage of helicopters is clearly good footage, and the kind of person who fights to get camera drones into the middle of a situation like this is the kind of person who'd try to get the helicopters and everything else in the shot good and tight. Close-up of the helicopter dumping water? Score!
These aren't stray animals, they are provably human beings on the scene somewhere, putting themselves and others in danger in order to be annoying paparazzi and excessively-wealthy-Silicon-valley-cocks AT THE SAME TIME.
By all means, shoot the drones on sight. No human paparazzi need be harmed, unless they croak from getting in the way of a massive fire on purpose.
I'm alarmed and impressed that they managed to get FIVE competing drones, all getting in the way as they tried to be 21st century paparazzi-by-wire. Literally, five rich people were doing this at the same time? What were they, waiting for the rich drone pilot bat-signal?
"DANGER on the freeway. Quick! Get in the way, and film it to post on rich douches of Instagram!"
Not that I'm bitter :D
Clearly, cow-ception. :)
Indeed. I think a fair number of people making the argument,
"This should be operated with minimal rules so the market can decide how best to handle things! Bad solutions will fail and the best solution will prevail!"
are shall we say innocent of history. Typically a system like the NYC medallion system exists because at some previous time, the looser 'freer' system was in place, and it persistently led to catastrophic results. The 30,000 cabs on the street fighting for fares was not an accident, it was the natural consequence of New York City being New York City. The more repressive and thoroughly unfree system that arose, evolved out of the peculiar challenges of New York City. One of them is extreme wealth, which drives the unaffordable cost of the medallions.
That very thing illustrates the problem: the market of NYC tries to put so many cabs on the road that the roads cease to work for anybody, including emergency vehicles, garbage collection and so on. It's a bit like a good citybuilder game: you can get situations where things go out of balance and snowballing consequences produce a massive die-off and the destruction of your city.
NYC is allowed to not choose that.
That depends on the extent to which cities and road systems (something created and designed by people, except in the case of Boston which was designed by cows) serve a social function as an indispensable part of that society.
If democratic society functions completely the same no matter what transportation does, then sure. Transportation can do what it likes as it doesn't matter.
If systems like cities absolutely require a transportation infrastructure, then society itself has a vested interest in dictating how that can go. It doesn't mean you have to have a state transportation system (though that does work). You can privatize it. Like taxi companies! Amazing how those can act with their own interests (even to the point of angering slashdotters) while also serving the needs and requirements of the larger society. You could nationalize it: you could nationalize Uber! But we typically don't, and so they function as independent entities but serve the requirements of the larger system, which must have some form of transportation to exist.
There's no special reason why 'a company arranging for rides between private persons' gets to step outside that overall context. If they are benefiting the overall society, we adapt to include them. If they can be recognized as a thing like a pyramid scheme, where it appears desirable but carries inevitable bad consequences that come out of what the system itself means, then we as a society get to say 'never mind the bait, this is forbidden because we don't like the bad consequences'.
Heck, net neutrality is an instance of society saying 'yes, fully enabling the freemarket will give companies more ability to drive profit, but we don't like the inefficiency of maximizing for THAT result and we don't like the bad consequences'.
Uber greases the wheels for certain high-quality easy transactions in transportation-heavy areas serving rich people wanting convenience and servitude, while turning over service of undesirable areas and situations to raw freemarket mathematics. Society is allowed to decide there are situations not subject to 'what the market will bear', and taxi companies are held to that on pain of losing permission to exist.
Uber wants to operate purely on freemarket principles and allow the individual drivers to fail this test with the buck stopping there. No larger global consequences, they just keep the profit and socialize the risk. Part of the system is churning through drivers aggressively with new ones entering the system, so by definition it requires subjecting riders to failing drivers at no penalty to Uber: it becomes the rider's problem to soak up the damage of the failed transaction and 'rate' the driver to get them fired (which I don't think is a guarantee? Depends on how many more drivers want to apply, surely). The rider takes on the burden of becoming the city's transportation police and justice system, actively criticizing the Uber driver and issuing rulings like a judge on which hapless schlub with a cellphone lives or dies in the Uber system. The rider gets a new job, which they must take seriously or the system breaks down and bad drivers continue to operate.
They're not paid for this service. The rider PAYS to perform this service. They are inspecting the meat by eating it, they are issuing licenses for surgery AFTER the operation takes place. (certainly loss of limb or death can be a consequence either from surgery or vehicle travel, licensed or unlicensed)
That's why 'a company arranging for rides' exists in a context. It's possible for a company to arrange for mob hits between private individuals, and that would still be illegal because the range of underlying behavior being 'arranged' contains societally undesirable things. Same with Uber.
I think you've slightly misunderstood one small detail.
Uber certainly does not add 'actually showing up' because of the ratings system. It adds 'firing drivers' because of the ratings system, which one might call 'churn'.
If you figure Uber's normal operation is stable employment, I think you're not quite understanding what Uber is: it's all about churn. There's nothing persistent about it, it's a 'cloud' of transportation. (if they start using that, especially in court, I want them to pay me)
As such, by design it must sometimes fail you as a user because in any given situation you must calculate the odds of your request being outside the range of accepted requests for that instance of 'driver'. You know nothing about the driver, because people are a wildly varying quantity and Uber is neither equipped for, nor interested in, guaranteeing driver behavior. The driver is a cloud driver and could be anything, if they are wildly inappropriate it's a question of how quickly the ratings gets 'em and Uber blackballs 'em (assuming that even happens, maybe they can just reapply under another name?)
The one thing you are guaranteed is a car that LOOKS good, and is not older than a set year. That's what Uber can draw a sharp line on, and they have the power to simply deny drivers with the wrong car. They're not set up to reject drivers as drivers, because the driver is the cloud and there are always more total strangers offering to drive for Uber. The faster they reject half-decent drivers who don't make ratings goals, the faster they can take in new drivers across the full range from great to miserable or even dangerous/criminal.
So it does NOT add 'actually showing up'. It means 'if they didn't show up, you get to give a resounding 'boooo!' to one packet of that cloud, which may never even know who you were. A guy fails that hard, he's probably failing for more customers than you. Or he got a flat or something? His tires looked good, but they were factory seconds. He cut corners and his vehicle broke: bad rating, he and his cutrate car are gone, and you get nothing. Other people's use of the ratings system did not protect you because it is *not* being applied against a static collection of drivers, as a taxicab company would be. It's being applied against a cloud and all the new drivers constantly coming in by design, are drivers you have no information about whatever.
Can I put it in computer terms? Uber is in permanent alpha. You are always paying for dailies because you're the test case. If, in the 'pissy obstructing of traffic case' something happens in the city that grossly affects transportation systems and they choose to fight back and get their way/protect their profit margin/what have you, the taxi system gets in your face and strikes and obstructs traffic (I assume that's what you mean?). Uber just vanishes, under those circumstances. It's gone, you can't get a ride at all. Not a strike, not a thing that can correct the underlying problem harming transportation, it just politely disappears and you have no rides left, period.