There is nothing "dying" or "stagnant" about the sector, which has seen explosive growth in the past ten years.
In fact, economically healthy centers like Denver and the Twin Cities are now overcrowded. There's been hypertrophic growth -- a very sharp and necessary correction is on its way.
Amazon's role in what will transpire is much more complex than your surmise about appy-fappy excitement to come.
By leveraging its clout and market-backed power (if not its own broken business model), Amazon may exercise vast power over distribution. That in turn has significant implications for the bottom lines of farmers and particularly for the types of smaller natural and organic growers who supply Whole Foods. Walmart has already beaten it in this area, but in a business with the thinnest margins there is always room for more degradation of labor.
By moving toward AI-driven workerless stores, Amazon can accelerate the pace of job loss that will soon swamp the retail sector with far-reaching social consequences. Even a public subsidy-dependent utopian like Elon Musk worries about what that will bring.
More generally, Amazon will be in a position to introduce to our food chain the types of values that have made it a hellhole for its domestic employees as well as a prime mover in the sweatshopping of the world. It's hard to imagine a more Stalinist corporation in the west, though Google certainly competes.
And lastly, expanding monopoly power will lead inevitably to more regulatory capture. One day, that free cantaloupe of yours may be swimming in carcinogenic pesticides yet be called "naturally grown" (and heartily recommended by the in-house food writer at Jeff's WaPo).
Brave words in defense of a social media platform that sees fit to disappear ideas and expression that it arbitrarily doesn't like.
You might give a little thought to the way Valley media platforms now shape public discourse along narrow lines and for what reasons; that is, if the Kool Aid is not too strong in you, young Jedi.
Only known moral uses of advanced AI (aka the GeorgeCarlin9000):
--deactivating the evil cyborgs on the "Presidential Debate Commission" --time-traveling to 1972 to make the paddles shorter on Pong (Butterfly Effect: population-wide striving uptick!) --reverse-engineering the Kardashian derriere for mass roll out
Apple's ability to sell its stuff both to well-heeled Boomers and debt-encumbered Millennials is the envy of many companies. Only booze skips across generational borders quite so effortlessly and merrily.
But it is in the timing of entry into the car market more than on any particular innovation that I think Apple may neatly capitalize.
As millions of Boomers prepare to go gently into that good night, an orgy of spending should accompany their last two decades. Health care, obviously, will account for the bulk of it, but before the worst medical bills are seen there's still time to clean out the estate in grand fashion. Quite a lot of this will be vanity spending, as current trends show, including age-defying creams, injections and implants. And little says youthful as eloquently as driving in an Apple Electric iCar to your hip replacement surgery.
Watching jealously from the sidelines with Lana Del Rey droning on the turntable, Millennials will take consolation from the fact that the job market will generally improve for younger folk. Keen after the lean barista years to live large, the iCar will be just the canvas on which to splatter their new affluence to greater effect than was allowed by iPhones, Watches and Mac Minis. That shit was tiny; this shit will be big.
To both groups, Apple can sell an idea as well as a vehicle. That idea is Your Own Personal Halo. The wish to consume with less guilt -- not reducing consumption patterns, but dressing them up in an ersatz techno-idealism (electricity is free! driving improves the climate!) -- should have tremendous appeal to those raised on Woodstock and Transformers cartoons alike. As Steve Jobs himself might have said, "Here's to the Panglosses..."
I don't carry a torch for Rand Paul, but I am grateful for his act of resistance.
You ask what effect is achieved by his resisting. I will reply, unromantically, almost none.
We could argue about public education (did he really reach anyone new who doesn't already know the Patriot Act is evil?) and about self-aggrandizement (was he merely campaigning?).
To my way of thinking, we are living in a time when our votes count for little, our representatives do little for us, and against this condition of a democratic people isolated from control of the state, a sickening reversal of control is instead true: the security state is ascendant and it is our freedom that is waning.
If my apprehension of our position vis-a-vis the state is correct, this means that most protest will be reduced to a minor symbolic key. Its value, then, is in what it symbolizes, and I would say a filibuster on this point of authoritarian government power symbolizes a refusal to surrender casually. A refusal to be cheapened to the point of not caring; a defiance.
Quantifying such things is easy. What is the net benefit? Again, almost zero. But not entirely. A spark is kindled, or if you prefer, a flicker is kept going in a small and dull flame, with the hope that later we may fan it into something bolder and more valuable.
Which gets me to thinking: with free electricity, wouldn't that be a great business opportunity, to build a cloud of servers in poorer Greeks' basements? Maybe that is the real plan behind the free electricity idea.
Hyuk-yuk.
It's not "thinking," you tone-deaf dolt, to joke about a nation that's suffering a severe depression. Your crack has the moral value of someone saying, "Say, 9-10 would have been a great day to short the airplane industry, har-de-har!"
It's simply you hanging your autism out before the entire board.
A reminder: sensible men and women have already voted on the merits of Congress.
As Gallup confirmed once more in its December 14 poll, Americans agree on at least one thing in our most divided land. We're led by idiots, chiselers, maniacs and fools:
Americans' job approval rating for Congress averaged 15% in 2014, close to the record-low yearly average of 14% found last year. The highest yearly average was measured in 2001, at 56%. Yearly averages haven't exceeded 20% in the past five years, as well as in six of the past seven years.
I notice you don't mention Willits in your pantheon of id talents. Wisely, I'd say. His design stewardship of Rage -- and its resulting perfect banality -- was as much a lodestone around its neck as was one more advanced yet performance-lacking Carmack technology. Put together, the mixture was lethal.
There was an id fantasy game in the works, briefly, a decade or more ago; it was killed off in favor of another FPS retread. I wonder what might have been if a) the faction that wanted to keep cloning Doom and Quake hadn't won or, alternatively b) instead of id consistently shedding its most notable design talents leaving Carmack surrounded with people content to recycle the past, he had struck out on his own with a new group of talent and created something original.
My advice to brave Edward: you already know the ugliness of the machine, so why bargain with the ghost inside?
The impossibility of a corrupt system according justice to its whistleblowers is a good reason for Edward to remain in Russia. Moreover, he should know, and will know based on poll data, that his sacrifice is scarcely appreciated by our society of sheep, anyway.
You've done your share. You've paid your price in loss of home and comfort. F--- Washington; construct a life out of all the many rich possibilities that have nothing to do with this declining empire and its sordid leaders.
Do you want to know what brings about the biblical apocalypse? Ignorance of the natural world in which we live. Buckle your seatbelts, because the ignorant are starting to drive this bus we call civilization, and the last stop is not utopia.
I hate religion as much as the next godless heathen, but really now.
Surely you don't think climate change is a direct result of belief? At worst, fantasies about the afterlife can make the world appear more disposable to the god-bothered, but I don't think it's churchy mumbo-jumbo that drives hyper-capitalism.
Something else has led the west to overproduce, overconsume, overbear and overlord. And the causes and reasons are rather more prosaic than heavenly.
Unfortunately, the US's first major "nation building" failure might be said to have occurred after the civil war... We defeated the insurgency; but never really managed to rebuild a functional society in the southern provinces. If subsequent events are any guide, we may just suck at dealing with religious zealots with shitty human rights records.
Oh, come.
Surely any society that can produce John Carmack can't be all bad.
How is that odd? Muslims and Jews aren't the fanatical threat to freedom and education that Conservative Christians currently are in America.
Really? Apparently you've never run across a your average non-westernized muslim(or standard conservative muslims), they're more than happy to shove their opinions down your throat. While doing so, they'll also demand that you directly accommodate them. Jews generally are happy to not shove their opinions down your throat on their religious issues, and the more conservative are generally happier to enclave themselves up and run their lives according to how they want to run them.
Let's leave aside your completely subjective generalities about Muslims and Jews.
Instead, let's focus on the single meaningful metric that might help us test your hypothesis about "shoving their opinions down your throat," by which is generally meant something akin to propagandizing and/or policy that leaves the audience little or no room for maneuver or objection. I'll just assume that's your meaning, too.
I would submit the annual US subsidy of $500 per man, woman and child ($3b total) in direct foreign assistance to Israel is probably a fairer measure of whose opinions are imposed on Americans. That's roughly one fifth of our entire foreign aid budget. Now, you might happen to agree with such aid for religious or ethnic reasons, as is your right; all fine and good. I happen to oppose it as largesse that's morally and strategically unwise. But our sheer inability as opponents to find Democratic or Republican political representatives who'll demur from the policy rather neatly fits the definition of having it shoved down our throats.
Seriously, though: as a longtime admirer, I have to say his genius would be better used in gaming if he rid himself of the albatross known as id.
Imagine what he could do in any number of R&D areas if he didn't have to ship games bogged down by boring narratives, bland level design and twenty-year old ideas of corridor-based run-and-gun.
I wish he'd turn his attention to improving AI and developing emergent gaming. The next frontier awaits, but our Einstein is bent on rendering the same old mousetrap in ever higher fidelity.
Like the eponymous player in the song Pinball Wizard, "I must've played them all," but I'm so fed up with the black heart of corporate gaming that I can see a move like this by MS or Sony driving me away from consoles.
I don't want Pay-2-Win on IOS games, I don't want to buy missing features for AAA titles as DLC, I don't want DRM hoops to jump through and I surely don't want a system requiring an always-on connection. Over Comcast -- are you kidding? I'm lucky if my Comcast connection is even usually-on.
It might be different, slightly, if gaming hadn't spent the last decade becoming less and less diverse, cannibalizing itself, regurgitating lots of paint-by-numbers stuff we've seen so many times already. So adding monetary injury to the insult of omnipresent banality is really a northbridge too far.
Lately, I find myself on GOG buying old titles for a pittance. They aren't all nirvana -- some plainly haven't held up -- but a few are quite amusing and richly satisfying (I'm looking at you, Dungeon Keeper). The 360 and PS3 sit in their boxes, unpacked for months since a recent house move. The iPad games go unthumbed. Gaming from before the present era of nonstop exploitation holds out its low-poly hand, and it's really WYSIWYG: the other mitt isn't concealed behind its back with a billy club!
Unfortunately, it's hard to get people to open their eyes about anything. Hardest perhaps of all with what they take to be benign, useful and friendly ("oooh, look at that Valentine's Day Google Doodle!"). Add ubiquity and the herd is fully placated.
As we watch Microsoft's fortunes wane and Google's rise, it's becoming obvious evil simply adapted to circumstances. It got cuter.
Wozniak said he was proud of how loyal Apple fans were to the iPhone
A product to which he contributed nothing. A company from which he is long divorced.
I understand the need for sentimentality in order to soften his criticism, but it is sentimentality. It gets tiresome seeing corporations -- and their ex-founders -- constantly flog these ersatz emotions. His phoniness is at a mild end of the spectrum, of course, compared to rows of low-salaried store employees standing in lines cheering customers...
And yes, I have a bloody iPhone. I'm not "proud" of it, and when I've been told at the Apple store "congratulations" I like to say, "Ehhh, no need. Many things make me happier than your products." That's how to stop a Stepford Clerk in his tracks.
Slashdot Mirror
is like getting nutritional tips from cannibals.
One guess why they want to fatten you up.
Relax. You may have lost your Kardashian drip feed, but the CIA can still see you.
There is nothing "dying" or "stagnant" about the sector, which has seen explosive growth in the past ten years.
In fact, economically healthy centers like Denver and the Twin Cities are now overcrowded. There's been hypertrophic growth -- a very sharp and necessary correction is on its way.
Amazon's role in what will transpire is much more complex than your surmise about appy-fappy excitement to come.
By leveraging its clout and market-backed power (if not its own broken business model), Amazon may exercise vast power over distribution. That in turn has significant implications for the bottom lines of farmers and particularly for the types of smaller natural and organic growers who supply Whole Foods. Walmart has already beaten it in this area, but in a business with the thinnest margins there is always room for more degradation of labor.
By moving toward AI-driven workerless stores, Amazon can accelerate the pace of job loss that will soon swamp the retail sector with far-reaching social consequences. Even a public subsidy-dependent utopian like Elon Musk worries about what that will bring.
More generally, Amazon will be in a position to introduce to our food chain the types of values that have made it a hellhole for its domestic employees as well as a prime mover in the sweatshopping of the world. It's hard to imagine a more Stalinist corporation in the west, though Google
certainly competes.
And lastly, expanding monopoly power will lead inevitably to more regulatory capture. One day, that free cantaloupe of yours may be swimming in carcinogenic pesticides yet be called "naturally grown" (and heartily recommended by the in-house food writer at Jeff's WaPo).
Eat up. I doubt you'll know the difference.
"Because the little baby tyrants" *snip*
Brave words in defense of a social media platform that sees fit to disappear ideas and expression that it arbitrarily doesn't like.
You might give a little thought to the way Valley media platforms now shape public discourse along narrow lines and for what reasons; that is, if the Kool Aid is not too strong in you, young Jedi.
Only known moral uses of advanced AI (aka the GeorgeCarlin9000):
--deactivating the evil cyborgs on the "Presidential Debate Commission"
--time-traveling to 1972 to make the paddles shorter on Pong (Butterfly Effect: population-wide striving uptick!)
--reverse-engineering the Kardashian derriere for mass roll out
Otherwise, beware!
Apple's ability to sell its stuff both to well-heeled Boomers and debt-encumbered Millennials is the envy of many companies. Only booze skips across generational borders quite so effortlessly and merrily.
But it is in the timing of entry into the car market more than on any particular innovation that I think Apple may neatly capitalize.
As millions of Boomers prepare to go gently into that good night, an orgy of spending should accompany their last two decades. Health care, obviously, will account for the bulk of it, but before the worst medical bills are seen there's still time to clean out the estate in grand fashion. Quite a lot of this will be vanity spending, as current trends show, including age-defying creams, injections and implants. And little says youthful as eloquently as driving in an Apple Electric iCar to your hip replacement surgery.
Watching jealously from the sidelines with Lana Del Rey droning on the turntable, Millennials will take consolation from the fact that the job market will generally improve for younger folk. Keen after the lean barista years to live large, the iCar will be just the canvas on which to splatter their new affluence to greater effect than was allowed by iPhones, Watches and Mac Minis. That shit was tiny; this shit will be big.
To both groups, Apple can sell an idea as well as a vehicle. That idea is Your Own Personal Halo. The wish to consume with less guilt -- not reducing consumption patterns, but dressing them up in an ersatz techno-idealism (electricity is free! driving improves the climate!) -- should have tremendous appeal to those raised on Woodstock and Transformers cartoons alike. As Steve Jobs himself might have said, "Here's to the Panglosses..."
"Psssst. Hey, sick person. Try this. The first one's on us!*"
*Free as in Daraprim, not free beer.
I don't carry a torch for Rand Paul, but I am grateful for his act of resistance.
You ask what effect is achieved by his resisting. I will reply, unromantically, almost none.
We could argue about public education (did he really reach anyone new who doesn't already know the Patriot Act is evil?) and about self-aggrandizement (was he merely campaigning?).
To my way of thinking, we are living in a time when our votes count for little, our representatives do little for us, and against this condition of a democratic people isolated from control of the state, a sickening reversal of control is instead true: the security state is ascendant and it is our freedom that is waning.
If my apprehension of our position vis-a-vis the state is correct, this means that most protest will be reduced to a minor symbolic key. Its value, then, is in what it symbolizes, and I would say a filibuster on this point of authoritarian government power symbolizes a refusal to surrender casually. A refusal to be cheapened to the point of not caring; a defiance.
Quantifying such things is easy. What is the net benefit? Again, almost zero. But not entirely. A spark is kindled, or if you prefer, a flicker is kept going in a small and dull flame, with the hope that later we may fan it into something bolder and more valuable.
The value of this filibuster is sustaining hope.
Which gets me to thinking: with free electricity, wouldn't that be a great business opportunity, to build a cloud of servers in poorer Greeks' basements? Maybe that is the real plan behind the free electricity idea.
Hyuk-yuk.
It's not "thinking," you tone-deaf dolt, to joke about a nation that's suffering a severe depression. Your crack has the moral value of someone saying, "Say, 9-10 would have been a great day to short the airplane industry, har-de-har!"
It's simply you hanging your autism out before the entire board.
A reminder: sensible men and women have already voted on the merits of Congress.
As Gallup confirmed once more in its December 14 poll, Americans agree on at least one thing in our most divided land. We're led by idiots, chiselers, maniacs and fools:
Americans' job approval rating for Congress averaged 15% in 2014, close to the record-low yearly average of 14% found last year. The highest yearly average was measured in 2001, at 56%. Yearly averages haven't exceeded 20% in the past five years, as well as in six of the past seven years.
Very good points.
I notice you don't mention Willits in your pantheon of id talents. Wisely, I'd say. His design stewardship of Rage -- and its resulting perfect banality -- was as much a lodestone around its neck as was one more advanced yet performance-lacking Carmack technology. Put together, the mixture was lethal.
There was an id fantasy game in the works, briefly, a decade or more ago; it was killed off in favor of another FPS retread. I wonder what might have been if a) the faction that wanted to keep cloning Doom and Quake hadn't won or, alternatively b) instead of id consistently shedding its most notable design talents leaving Carmack surrounded with people content to recycle the past, he had struck out on his own with a new group of talent and created something original.
I don't understand how id thought that this level of quality was acceptable for release.
Nor did I.
That said, as a longtime admirer of his pioneering work, I'm pleased he's on to a new and exciting challenge. Thanks for the memories, John.
My advice to brave Edward: you already know the ugliness of the machine, so why bargain with the ghost inside?
The impossibility of a corrupt system according justice to its whistleblowers is a good reason for Edward to remain in Russia. Moreover, he should know, and will know based on poll data, that his sacrifice is scarcely appreciated by our society of sheep, anyway.
You've done your share. You've paid your price in loss of home and comfort. F--- Washington; construct a life out of all the many rich possibilities that have nothing to do with this declining empire and its sordid leaders.
Do you want to know what brings about the biblical apocalypse? Ignorance of the natural world in which we live. Buckle your seatbelts, because the ignorant are starting to drive this bus we call civilization, and the last stop is not utopia.
I hate religion as much as the next godless heathen, but really now.
Surely you don't think climate change is a direct result of belief? At worst, fantasies about the afterlife can make the world appear more disposable to the god-bothered, but I don't think it's churchy mumbo-jumbo that drives hyper-capitalism.
Something else has led the west to overproduce, overconsume, overbear and overlord. And the causes and reasons are rather more prosaic than heavenly.
Unfortunately, the US's first major "nation building" failure might be said to have occurred after the civil war... We defeated the insurgency; but never really managed to rebuild a functional society in the southern provinces. If subsequent events are any guide, we may just suck at dealing with religious zealots with shitty human rights records.
Oh, come.
Surely any society that can produce John Carmack can't be all bad.
How is that odd? Muslims and Jews aren't the fanatical threat to freedom and education that Conservative Christians currently are in America.
Really? Apparently you've never run across a your average non-westernized muslim(or standard conservative muslims), they're more than happy to shove their opinions down your throat. While doing so, they'll also demand that you directly accommodate them. Jews generally are happy to not shove their opinions down your throat on their religious issues, and the more conservative are generally happier to enclave themselves up and run their lives according to how they want to run them.
Let's leave aside your completely subjective generalities about Muslims and Jews.
Instead, let's focus on the single meaningful metric that might help us test your hypothesis about "shoving their opinions down your throat," by which is generally meant something akin to propagandizing and/or policy that leaves the audience little or no room for maneuver or objection. I'll just assume that's your meaning, too.
I would submit the annual US subsidy of $500 per man, woman and child ($3b total) in direct foreign assistance to Israel is probably a fairer measure of whose opinions are imposed on Americans. That's roughly one fifth of our entire foreign aid budget. Now, you might happen to agree with such aid for religious or ethnic reasons, as is your right; all fine and good. I happen to oppose it as largesse that's morally and strategically unwise. But our sheer inability as opponents to find Democratic or Republican political representatives who'll demur from the policy rather neatly fits the definition of having it shoved down our throats.
"However, the neural net still struggles to match average human performance in games such as Seaquest, Q*bert and, most importantly, Space Invaders."
There's the Singularity put off for another year.
My pooch was always prone to dingleberries. Too much magnetic alignment, obviously.
Seriously, though: as a longtime admirer, I have to say his genius would be better used in gaming if he rid himself of the albatross known as id.
Imagine what he could do in any number of R&D areas if he didn't have to ship games bogged down by boring narratives, bland level design and twenty-year old ideas of corridor-based run-and-gun.
I wish he'd turn his attention to improving AI and developing emergent gaming. The next frontier awaits, but our Einstein is bent on rendering the same old mousetrap in ever higher fidelity.
Those who aren't being wiretapped, tortured or disappeared by the US imperium have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Like the eponymous player in the song Pinball Wizard, "I must've played them all," but I'm so fed up with the black heart of corporate gaming that I can see a move like this by MS or Sony driving me away from consoles.
I don't want Pay-2-Win on IOS games, I don't want to buy missing features for AAA titles as DLC, I don't want DRM hoops to jump through and I surely don't want a system requiring an always-on connection. Over Comcast -- are you kidding? I'm lucky if my Comcast connection is even usually-on.
It might be different, slightly, if gaming hadn't spent the last decade becoming less and less diverse, cannibalizing itself, regurgitating lots of paint-by-numbers stuff we've seen so many times already. So adding monetary injury to the insult of omnipresent banality is really a northbridge too far.
Lately, I find myself on GOG buying old titles for a pittance. They aren't all nirvana -- some plainly haven't held up -- but a few are quite amusing and richly satisfying (I'm looking at you, Dungeon Keeper). The 360 and PS3 sit in their boxes, unpacked for months since a recent house move. The iPad games go unthumbed. Gaming from before the present era of nonstop exploitation holds out its low-poly hand, and it's really WYSIWYG: the other mitt isn't concealed behind its back with a billy club!
Excellent points.
Unfortunately, it's hard to get people to open their eyes about anything. Hardest perhaps of all with what they take to be benign, useful and friendly ("oooh, look at that Valentine's Day Google Doodle!"). Add ubiquity and the herd is fully placated.
As we watch Microsoft's fortunes wane and Google's rise, it's becoming obvious evil simply adapted to circumstances. It got cuter.
They taught the rats to choose the active light source by poking their noses into a port to receive a sip of water as a reward
Great tool for positive reinforcement in our congress critters. Still, science fiction teaches us it is always better to stimulate the pain receptors!
Wozniak said he was proud of how loyal Apple fans were to the iPhone
A product to which he contributed nothing. A company from which he is long divorced.
I understand the need for sentimentality in order to soften his criticism, but it is sentimentality. It gets tiresome seeing corporations -- and their ex-founders -- constantly flog these ersatz emotions. His phoniness is at a mild end of the spectrum, of course, compared to rows of low-salaried store employees standing in lines cheering customers...
And yes, I have a bloody iPhone. I'm not "proud" of it, and when I've been told at the Apple store "congratulations" I like to say, "Ehhh, no need. Many things make me happier than your products." That's how to stop a Stepford Clerk in his tracks.
Coming soon to the Wii: "Wiiiiii Me? The Zappy Fun-er-cizer!"