I think extraneous factors play heavily into it as well, and that's just more crap for machine learning to have to deal with.
What's the weather like on the first few weekends? (Might significantly impact attendance, and early attendance can make/break blockbusters.) What other movies are competing with it? When did they come out? (And how did the weather the first few weekends play into the timing of competing movies?) How similar/dissimilar to the hits of the last few years is this movie? (And is that good or bad?) Have any of the people involved (studios, producers, stars) been in the news lately? For what reasons? Good? Bad? Did anyone die during filming or shortly thereafter? (See Brandon Lee, Paul Walker.)
Are any major public figures making statements about the movie? Good or bad? Is any group protesting it? Is it already being speculated to win awards? Razzies or good ones?
There are so many things that can impact whether or not a movie is a hit that are extraneous to the movie that it seems unlikely that machine learning will be able to really make these predictions. I'm not sure that you can even predict a baseline that's meaningful, if the variance between hit and flop being driven by the extraneous factors is too high.
Seems like this could be far easier done with a Google-Maps like App designed specifically for airports. Look up the gate, look up the departure time, figure out what the walking time to the gate is, and give the user a notification and directions when it's time to head over there. If you're at the gate, no notification or directions required.
There are a ton more roads and business in the world than there are airports. If google maps can help me catch a bus to get where I need to go on time, there's no reason it can't do the same with passengers at the airport. Then it's an entirely opt-in technology, and pretty much no new technology or infrastructure is required.
Sure, it won't get you 100% of travelers on time, but for most slow or confused or first-time travelers, it would likely be a very nice tool to have.
The district you taught in is not a very representative sample. Here is some data. In particular you can watch AZ's teacher salaries crest and then start going lower, ultimately ending back where they were in the 1970s. Several other states show the same pattern.
I provided you a nice bunch of links. Feel free to peruse them. Your anecdotes do not seem to match reality. Pensions and salaries, in particular, seem to be opposite what you think they are.
If you want to lay blame for increasing education costs, those aren't the places you can really lay it.
I'm unclear about what your argument is here. You've established that money doesn't seem to improve education, so spending that money on civic engagement for a day doesn't seem likely to change the lack of proficient students. And it's also not clear that the groups of students here are the same students, making the point even more moot.
That looks like pretty solid data. You tied the increase to teachers having better retirement packages, but that's definitely not the case. Teacher salaries have been flat or declining over most of that period, and pensions are generally tied to salary. If you look at pension data, it generally shows retired teachers getting paid pretty poorly. 65% of states have an average teacher pension under $25k/year.
A more recent look at education costs pegged it at $122k/student, but that's not a ton lower than what you cited. If you dig into where the money is going, it looks like salaries are actually falling, while benefits are going up. That's no surprise - health insurance costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades. Another sink is infrastructure. Schools are continuing to chase technology, and computers and networking are both expensive and quick to depreciate.
I don't disagree that it looks like school costs are rapidly going up without much to show for it. But does that mean that money is being spent ineffectively, has it kept kids from falling behind, or more likely, a mixture of the two?
This is well known in the typography field. The space between letters is known as keming, and various fonts do it better or worse. This doesn't really have anything to do with the browser - it's font-specific.
Baltimore has entire high schools where not one child is performing at grade level...
So what is Maryland doing about it? You do know that states largely control their education system, right? Other than a bunch of federal mandates required to get federal funding, states can do what they want.
Since establishing a federal department of education, student achievement has stagnated while spending has exploded...
That's an interesting assertion. Can you back that up with any facts?
Why doesn't the state just self publish the damn books for $1 a piece?
Because a large percent of the population wants small governments. Adding a publishing house to state government is the opposite of that.
Has k-12 reading, writing and math really changed that much in that last 100 years?
Yes, yes it has. It has changed dramatically over that time. We also need to teach other subjects now. You might have heard of these newfangled computers, and this thing called the internet. 100 year old books are not sufficient to teach them.
Why are we paying text book publishers?
See previous answer.
I got awesome stuff from the early 1900s. Latin readers, geometry etc.Those books were heads and shoulders above the text books I had in school.
And I got awesome scifi and fantasy books, which were also head and shoulders above the text books I had in school. It doesn't mean that mine or yours were sufficient to replace the textbooks, since they were on different topics than what's being taught in school.
Look, I hate the publishing industry, as it's anti-consumer, hostile, and insanely greedy. But to pretend that we can teach school out of even 30 year old books is ridiculous. You also don't seem to understand the scope of education. You can't purchase enough textbooks for a half million students at the thrift store. Education continuously evolves, generally for the better. If you're not familiar with the expectations we currently have for K-12 education, you might want to look into that. You're going to be very surprised about how different it is from what you remember in school.
Kim was educated in Switzerland. That's a thriving, educated, wealthy country, and it has access to everything the world has to offer. Going from there back to North Korea must have really been eye-opening. Sure, Kim gets what he wants because his family sucks the wealth out of the country, but other than the rest of the aristocracy, nobody really has anything. It's a poor, poor country, where famine can kill hundreds of thousands in a given year. Anywhere he goes outside of his curated estate he sees abject poverty.
I wouldn't be surprised if one factor is that he realizes that making everyone in North Korea 2x as wealthy will make him 100x as wealthy. That making life better for the peasants will make him more of a god than he already is. It only makes sense - the cult of personality is well established. Make life better for people, and you cement a legitimate place in history as a great leader.
If China said "not supporting any of your crazy military plans", I think Plan B is enrich the country, so those at the top can benefit even more. Yes, probably needed to consolidate power before doing that. He's now got power, a bargaining chip in a robust nuclear and missile program, and it's time to both become richer and more beloved. It's a solid plan.
While I'm not really on the 'environmental disaster" bandwagon, your argument is stupid. Are you unfamiliar with what lakes are and how they work?
Lakes have topography. They're not cylinders. If you drain 10' of water from a lake, it gets a LOT smaller. Large amounts of any lake are less than 10' deep. That impacts the rivers that flow out of it, all of the people that live near it, all the boating and shipping that uses it, and the massive amount of wetlands around the lake. It also kills off a ton of shallow-water habitat where lots of things live. Yes, that will eventually come back, but it's not an instant process.
Once the shallows are gone, there is a lower surface area to volume ratio, which impacts oxygen exchange. If that goes down enough, you get toxic algae blooms, and lots of stuff in the lake dies.
Saying that there's 500,000 years of water is a ridiculous statement which ignores everything about the lake except for its geometric volume. Pretty much everything you've ignored is more important than the exact volume of water in the lake.
You can't just expect to remove a lot of water from a lake and nothing to happen. I don't think this particular factory is going to be a huge issue, but the point made in the summary is an important one: This is the first major exemption granted. If it sets the stage for more of them in other states, they could eventually add up to enough to be really significant.
Autopilot cannot 'see' plainly visible concrete barriers...Why is a technology being allowed to drive if it cannot see what it is in front of it, like an 82-year old grandpa?
Teslas went past that exact same part of the road bunches of times before and never had an issue. That exact same Tesla went past that barrier multiple times before the crash. It is very clear that Teslas could see it, but for some reason they had trouble identifying what to do about it in a few situations. That is the opposite of not being able to see the barrier.
Human driving is very safe if you consider the 3.2 *trillion* miles driving in the US every year. Much safer than Autopilot would be if it were to drive everywhere and in all conditions like a human.
I provided evidence to the contrary, and you decided you didn't like it. You declined to provide any evidence to back up your lie.
Well, there are no self driving cars, they all have humans in them.
There is an entire list of issues with the NHSTA study with regards to it's suitability to make any comment on the safety of Autopilot; it does not draw that conclusion because the sample wasn't right to draw that conclusion and it was likely a Tesla media spin.
Anecdotes, made up shit, and guesses aren't data, and you can't claim "facts" stemming from them. We have well established methods to determine relative risk, and I'm a little baffled why you don't seem care about them.
If you just want to feel and believe random shit, good for you. But you don't to get to label your personal fantasy as fact and truth. You've spent time arguing with me ignoring any facts I might present, and providing none of your own. That's not how adults communicate.
Says he of the ever moving goalposts. Waaay back in this conversation, you said
So this is the version where they got it not to kill people? Funny, I would have put that feature in first.
You didn't say "better than humans" or any sort of comparison to humans. You effectively said, "It has to be perfect."
As soon as I pointed out how perfect is a ridiculous standard, considering humans aren't perfect, you started shifting those goalposts. Next it was, "why couldn't the system see something people can see?". What you've done is pick one situation where the system didn't work as intended, you ignored hundreds of the exact same situation, in the exact same part of the exact same road where it did, so I guess it makes sense for this to be an issue for you. Rational people don't do that. Only people with a serious agenda cherry pick like that and ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
In your last two sentences, you've finally gotten to a reasonable argument to have:
Human driving is very safe if you consider the 3.2 *trillion* miles driving in the US every year. Much safer than Autopilot would be if it were to drive everywhere and in all conditions like a human.
Now we're comparing rates of accidents between humans as a whole and autopilot as a whole. Bravo, this is actually meaningful, and what I was saying all along, albeit indirectly.
In the NHSTA's report on the Tesla crash where it hit the semi-truck side-on and took off the top of the car, they interestingly don't find fault with Tesla. Just that they needed to be more specific on the limitations of autopilot. And buried in that report is a graph that shows auto-steer dropping the accident rate (airbag deployment) per million miles from 1.3 to 0.8 when it's enabled. I'm finding it hard to find non-fatality rates for the whole US, but in the couple of states I looked at, the accident rate seems to be between 1 and 3 for most types of roads.
If you've got more comprehensive and current research, I'd be very happy to see it. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a ton, but what's out there seems to strongly suggest that the current self-driving tech is at least as safe as the average driver, if not more safe, in most circumstances.
See, you're jumping to conclusions here. How did you get from "autopilot" to "automatic"? It's like you think the "auto" in both words tie them together. "Auto" actually comes from "automobile", and it's thus a shortened version of "Automobile Pilot".
Don't be a moran and jump to conclusions like that.
I think a smarter bet is to continue down their path, and keep the tech they develop as backup or supplemental sensing to go with the cheap LIDAR, LIDAR has some real limitations, and what they're currently working with mitigates some of them. Likewise, what they're currently working with has some severe limitations, and LIDAR mitigates some of them as well.
No reason not to use complementary systems, especially if they have developed half that system already.
If you're going to honestly complain about self driving cars, you're obligated to require that feature in human driven cars too. Apples to apples and all that.
I think that's a logical conclusion, but it might not be the correct one.
Prime could be a loss leader, but Prime members could buy substantially more products because of the benefits it provides. I don't know enough about Amazon's finances to know whether or not that's true, but I also don't know anyone with Prime who doesn't use it heavily.
It's entirely possible that it doesn't directly make Amazon money, but instead ups their sales volume.
I've worked for the government, and that was not the case in the least. I managed private sector vendors, and when I needed to travel 500 miles to go too their office, I got a decade old ford focus to drive there and back. When they came to visit me, they flew first class or took the company jet.
Yes, they technically had competition. But I can tell you right now that a) their competition was not really that competitive, and b) their business model was to look pretty and justify their continued existence while sucking as much money out of the government as possible.
Had we done their work in-house, even if it took 2x as many people, we still wouldn't have been flying first class and maintaining a private jet. Everyone decries government inefficiency, but at the minimum, government salaries, perks, and travel are highly regulated and bare-bones compared to most private sector companies. When multiple private sector companies are bidding for a government contract, they're all building in the cost of their gleaming campus, first class travel, golden parachutes, etc.
The issue with the government is that it's hard to get rid of positions once you make them. Or if you are making limited term positions, it's hard to hire and retain people for them, because the government pays so much less than the private sector. The only real benefit of a government job is that they generally don't go away, so you've got it for as long as you want it. (And here I'm talking true civil servants, not political/appointed positions.)
Yeah, fuck replaceable batteries. I had them in my S4, and as time went on, it was more and more of a pain. I wore the case/cover out, and I spent a lot of mental tallying to make sure I was putting the dead one in and taking the full one out, and vice-versa. Replaceable batteries are just another thing you need to buy, have, keep track of, and plan around.
I'm sold on the water resistant S7 I have now. Wireless charging saves the port which is what killed my S4, and when the battery is dead, the phone is dead. That should be about 4 years, by the rate I'm going.
I wanted to drink the coolaid and love the replaceable batteries in my S4, but it was just a monumental pain in the ass. Two extra in my bag, head to work, smite my current battery on the way, because "I've got 2 extra!" Get to work, rip off the case, rip off the back, stick in a new one, throw the near dead one into my bag, put the case and cover back on. Use that battery all day. On the way home, smite that battery.
Now I've got 2 near dead batteries, one full one, and now what? Plug in the phone, try to fill the current one. Hope to remember before bed too swap it for the dead one in the bag. But which one is that?
Micro-managing batteries and ripping off and replacing covers and cases is a pain in the ass. Now, I drop the phone on the cradle at home. I drop it on the puck at work. When I leave either it's full. Yes, this battery won't last as long as the multiples I had before. But so fucking what? It's convenient, doesn't require tearing my phone down multiple times a day, and requires no effort on my part.
Yes, I'll get a few years less out of this phone. And that's totally worth it.
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I think extraneous factors play heavily into it as well, and that's just more crap for machine learning to have to deal with.
What's the weather like on the first few weekends? (Might significantly impact attendance, and early attendance can make/break blockbusters.) What other movies are competing with it? When did they come out? (And how did the weather the first few weekends play into the timing of competing movies?) How similar/dissimilar to the hits of the last few years is this movie? (And is that good or bad?) Have any of the people involved (studios, producers, stars) been in the news lately? For what reasons? Good? Bad? Did anyone die during filming or shortly thereafter? (See Brandon Lee, Paul Walker.)
Are any major public figures making statements about the movie? Good or bad? Is any group protesting it? Is it already being speculated to win awards? Razzies or good ones?
There are so many things that can impact whether or not a movie is a hit that are extraneous to the movie that it seems unlikely that machine learning will be able to really make these predictions. I'm not sure that you can even predict a baseline that's meaningful, if the variance between hit and flop being driven by the extraneous factors is too high.
Seems like this could be far easier done with a Google-Maps like App designed specifically for airports. Look up the gate, look up the departure time, figure out what the walking time to the gate is, and give the user a notification and directions when it's time to head over there. If you're at the gate, no notification or directions required.
There are a ton more roads and business in the world than there are airports. If google maps can help me catch a bus to get where I need to go on time, there's no reason it can't do the same with passengers at the airport. Then it's an entirely opt-in technology, and pretty much no new technology or infrastructure is required.
Sure, it won't get you 100% of travelers on time, but for most slow or confused or first-time travelers, it would likely be a very nice tool to have.
The district you taught in is not a very representative sample. Here is some data. In particular you can watch AZ's teacher salaries crest and then start going lower, ultimately ending back where they were in the 1970s. Several other states show the same pattern.
I provided you a nice bunch of links. Feel free to peruse them. Your anecdotes do not seem to match reality. Pensions and salaries, in particular, seem to be opposite what you think they are.
If you want to lay blame for increasing education costs, those aren't the places you can really lay it.
I'm unclear about what your argument is here. You've established that money doesn't seem to improve education, so spending that money on civic engagement for a day doesn't seem likely to change the lack of proficient students. And it's also not clear that the groups of students here are the same students, making the point even more moot.
That looks like pretty solid data. You tied the increase to teachers having better retirement packages, but that's definitely not the case. Teacher salaries have been flat or declining over most of that period, and pensions are generally tied to salary. If you look at pension data, it generally shows retired teachers getting paid pretty poorly. 65% of states have an average teacher pension under $25k/year.
A more recent look at education costs pegged it at $122k/student, but that's not a ton lower than what you cited. If you dig into where the money is going, it looks like salaries are actually falling, while benefits are going up. That's no surprise - health insurance costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades. Another sink is infrastructure. Schools are continuing to chase technology, and computers and networking are both expensive and quick to depreciate.
I don't disagree that it looks like school costs are rapidly going up without much to show for it. But does that mean that money is being spent ineffectively, has it kept kids from falling behind, or more likely, a mixture of the two?
This is well known in the typography field. The space between letters is known as keming, and various fonts do it better or worse. This doesn't really have anything to do with the browser - it's font-specific.
Baltimore has entire high schools where not one child is performing at grade level...
So what is Maryland doing about it? You do know that states largely control their education system, right? Other than a bunch of federal mandates required to get federal funding, states can do what they want.
Since establishing a federal department of education, student achievement has stagnated while spending has exploded...
That's an interesting assertion. Can you back that up with any facts?
Why doesn't the state just self publish the damn books for $1 a piece?
Because a large percent of the population wants small governments. Adding a publishing house to state government is the opposite of that.
Has k-12 reading, writing and math really changed that much in that last 100 years?
Yes, yes it has. It has changed dramatically over that time. We also need to teach other subjects now. You might have heard of these newfangled computers, and this thing called the internet. 100 year old books are not sufficient to teach them.
Why are we paying text book publishers?
See previous answer.
I got awesome stuff from the early 1900s. Latin readers, geometry etc.Those books were heads and shoulders above the text books I had in school.
And I got awesome scifi and fantasy books, which were also head and shoulders above the text books I had in school. It doesn't mean that mine or yours were sufficient to replace the textbooks, since they were on different topics than what's being taught in school.
Look, I hate the publishing industry, as it's anti-consumer, hostile, and insanely greedy. But to pretend that we can teach school out of even 30 year old books is ridiculous. You also don't seem to understand the scope of education. You can't purchase enough textbooks for a half million students at the thrift store. Education continuously evolves, generally for the better. If you're not familiar with the expectations we currently have for K-12 education, you might want to look into that. You're going to be very surprised about how different it is from what you remember in school.
I think it's plausible.
Kim was educated in Switzerland. That's a thriving, educated, wealthy country, and it has access to everything the world has to offer. Going from there back to North Korea must have really been eye-opening. Sure, Kim gets what he wants because his family sucks the wealth out of the country, but other than the rest of the aristocracy, nobody really has anything. It's a poor, poor country, where famine can kill hundreds of thousands in a given year. Anywhere he goes outside of his curated estate he sees abject poverty.
I wouldn't be surprised if one factor is that he realizes that making everyone in North Korea 2x as wealthy will make him 100x as wealthy. That making life better for the peasants will make him more of a god than he already is. It only makes sense - the cult of personality is well established. Make life better for people, and you cement a legitimate place in history as a great leader.
If China said "not supporting any of your crazy military plans", I think Plan B is enrich the country, so those at the top can benefit even more. Yes, probably needed to consolidate power before doing that. He's now got power, a bargaining chip in a robust nuclear and missile program, and it's time to both become richer and more beloved. It's a solid plan.
Video of the whole flight is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
While I'm not really on the 'environmental disaster" bandwagon, your argument is stupid. Are you unfamiliar with what lakes are and how they work?
Lakes have topography. They're not cylinders. If you drain 10' of water from a lake, it gets a LOT smaller. Large amounts of any lake are less than 10' deep. That impacts the rivers that flow out of it, all of the people that live near it, all the boating and shipping that uses it, and the massive amount of wetlands around the lake. It also kills off a ton of shallow-water habitat where lots of things live. Yes, that will eventually come back, but it's not an instant process.
Once the shallows are gone, there is a lower surface area to volume ratio, which impacts oxygen exchange. If that goes down enough, you get toxic algae blooms, and lots of stuff in the lake dies.
Saying that there's 500,000 years of water is a ridiculous statement which ignores everything about the lake except for its geometric volume. Pretty much everything you've ignored is more important than the exact volume of water in the lake.
You can't just expect to remove a lot of water from a lake and nothing to happen. I don't think this particular factory is going to be a huge issue, but the point made in the summary is an important one: This is the first major exemption granted. If it sets the stage for more of them in other states, they could eventually add up to enough to be really significant.
I was just thinking the same thing. One of my passions in life is coming up with clever ways to do less work while getting more accomplished.
Autopilot cannot 'see' plainly visible concrete barriers...Why is a technology being allowed to drive if it cannot see what it is in front of it, like an 82-year old grandpa?
Teslas went past that exact same part of the road bunches of times before and never had an issue. That exact same Tesla went past that barrier multiple times before the crash. It is very clear that Teslas could see it, but for some reason they had trouble identifying what to do about it in a few situations. That is the opposite of not being able to see the barrier.
Human driving is very safe if you consider the 3.2 *trillion* miles driving in the US every year. Much safer than Autopilot would be if it were to drive everywhere and in all conditions like a human.
I provided evidence to the contrary, and you decided you didn't like it. You declined to provide any evidence to back up your lie.
Well, there are no self driving cars, they all have humans in them.
Did you miss this?
There is an entire list of issues with the NHSTA study with regards to it's suitability to make any comment on the safety of Autopilot; it does not draw that conclusion because the sample wasn't right to draw that conclusion and it was likely a Tesla media spin.
That's a flat out fabrication on your part.
Maybe that's just how you make arguments.
Well, that's what you get for denying them additional revenue! What, you think you have the right to just pay for what you use? Silly peasant.
Anecdotes, made up shit, and guesses aren't data, and you can't claim "facts" stemming from them. We have well established methods to determine relative risk, and I'm a little baffled why you don't seem care about them.
If you just want to feel and believe random shit, good for you. But you don't to get to label your personal fantasy as fact and truth. You've spent time arguing with me ignoring any facts I might present, and providing none of your own. That's not how adults communicate.
You keep trying to side track the conversation.
Says he of the ever moving goalposts. Waaay back in this conversation, you said
So this is the version where they got it not to kill people? Funny, I would have put that feature in first.
You didn't say "better than humans" or any sort of comparison to humans. You effectively said, "It has to be perfect."
As soon as I pointed out how perfect is a ridiculous standard, considering humans aren't perfect, you started shifting those goalposts. Next it was, "why couldn't the system see something people can see?". What you've done is pick one situation where the system didn't work as intended, you ignored hundreds of the exact same situation, in the exact same part of the exact same road where it did, so I guess it makes sense for this to be an issue for you. Rational people don't do that. Only people with a serious agenda cherry pick like that and ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
In your last two sentences, you've finally gotten to a reasonable argument to have:
Human driving is very safe if you consider the 3.2 *trillion* miles driving in the US every year. Much safer than Autopilot would be if it were to drive everywhere and in all conditions like a human.
Now we're comparing rates of accidents between humans as a whole and autopilot as a whole. Bravo, this is actually meaningful, and what I was saying all along, albeit indirectly.
So lets have that discussion. There isn't a ton of research on this, but there is a little. AUTOMATED VEHICLE CRASH RATE COMPARISON USING NATURALISTIC DATA is from 2016 and finds that self driving cars are a lot safer. How Safe Are Self-Driving Cars? Waymo Proves They’re Pretty Darn Safeis from 2017 and summaries WayMo data, which you can argue is likely a bit biased towards Google. But even in the worst case scenario, they find self-driving cars an order of magnitude safer than human drivers.
In the NHSTA's report on the Tesla crash where it hit the semi-truck side-on and took off the top of the car, they interestingly don't find fault with Tesla. Just that they needed to be more specific on the limitations of autopilot. And buried in that report is a graph that shows auto-steer dropping the accident rate (airbag deployment) per million miles from 1.3 to 0.8 when it's enabled. I'm finding it hard to find non-fatality rates for the whole US, but in the couple of states I looked at, the accident rate seems to be between 1 and 3 for most types of roads.
If you've got more comprehensive and current research, I'd be very happy to see it. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a ton, but what's out there seems to strongly suggest that the current self-driving tech is at least as safe as the average driver, if not more safe, in most circumstances.
So humans never crash into those? You live in a much different world than I do.
Because we can't have a smaller government if it's the wrong small government.
See, you're jumping to conclusions here. How did you get from "autopilot" to "automatic"? It's like you think the "auto" in both words tie them together. "Auto" actually comes from "automobile", and it's thus a shortened version of "Automobile Pilot".
Don't be a moran and jump to conclusions like that.
I think a smarter bet is to continue down their path, and keep the tech they develop as backup or supplemental sensing to go with the cheap LIDAR, LIDAR has some real limitations, and what they're currently working with mitigates some of them. Likewise, what they're currently working with has some severe limitations, and LIDAR mitigates some of them as well.
No reason not to use complementary systems, especially if they have developed half that system already.
If you're going to honestly complain about self driving cars, you're obligated to require that feature in human driven cars too. Apples to apples and all that.
Gotta make a big enough family. It's a project he's really excited about getting into.
I think that's a logical conclusion, but it might not be the correct one.
Prime could be a loss leader, but Prime members could buy substantially more products because of the benefits it provides. I don't know enough about Amazon's finances to know whether or not that's true, but I also don't know anyone with Prime who doesn't use it heavily.
It's entirely possible that it doesn't directly make Amazon money, but instead ups their sales volume.
I've worked for the government, and that was not the case in the least. I managed private sector vendors, and when I needed to travel 500 miles to go too their office, I got a decade old ford focus to drive there and back. When they came to visit me, they flew first class or took the company jet.
Yes, they technically had competition. But I can tell you right now that a) their competition was not really that competitive, and b) their business model was to look pretty and justify their continued existence while sucking as much money out of the government as possible.
Had we done their work in-house, even if it took 2x as many people, we still wouldn't have been flying first class and maintaining a private jet. Everyone decries government inefficiency, but at the minimum, government salaries, perks, and travel are highly regulated and bare-bones compared to most private sector companies. When multiple private sector companies are bidding for a government contract, they're all building in the cost of their gleaming campus, first class travel, golden parachutes, etc.
The issue with the government is that it's hard to get rid of positions once you make them. Or if you are making limited term positions, it's hard to hire and retain people for them, because the government pays so much less than the private sector. The only real benefit of a government job is that they generally don't go away, so you've got it for as long as you want it. (And here I'm talking true civil servants, not political/appointed positions.)
Yeah, fuck replaceable batteries. I had them in my S4, and as time went on, it was more and more of a pain. I wore the case/cover out, and I spent a lot of mental tallying to make sure I was putting the dead one in and taking the full one out, and vice-versa. Replaceable batteries are just another thing you need to buy, have, keep track of, and plan around.
I'm sold on the water resistant S7 I have now. Wireless charging saves the port which is what killed my S4, and when the battery is dead, the phone is dead. That should be about 4 years, by the rate I'm going.
I wanted to drink the coolaid and love the replaceable batteries in my S4, but it was just a monumental pain in the ass. Two extra in my bag, head to work, smite my current battery on the way, because "I've got 2 extra!" Get to work, rip off the case, rip off the back, stick in a new one, throw the near dead one into my bag, put the case and cover back on. Use that battery all day. On the way home, smite that battery.
Now I've got 2 near dead batteries, one full one, and now what? Plug in the phone, try to fill the current one. Hope to remember before bed too swap it for the dead one in the bag. But which one is that?
Micro-managing batteries and ripping off and replacing covers and cases is a pain in the ass. Now, I drop the phone on the cradle at home. I drop it on the puck at work. When I leave either it's full. Yes, this battery won't last as long as the multiples I had before. But so fucking what? It's convenient, doesn't require tearing my phone down multiple times a day, and requires no effort on my part.
Yes, I'll get a few years less out of this phone. And that's totally worth it.