For my last TV, the "Smart" TVs were priced far cheaper for the same quality/features than any dumb monitor I could find when on sale. I bought the "Smart" TV, and tried using it. Blew me away that in 2017 when I can pinch zoom, swipe words, etc., that I was stuck arrowing around with a remote to type anything in any of the apps. What the hell? "Smart"?
And once I realized that my TV was also going to start trying to show me ads while using some of the apps, it got disconnected and I picked up a cheap mini-comp with HDMI for the brains instead. Wireless keyboard and mouse, and boom, Ubuntu runs everything I need it to, WINE picks up some slack, and it's all way faster, with less ads, and I don't run the risk of this BS where an update I can't control kills it off.
You may find it harder and harder to find a dumb TV as time goes on. As long as I can isolate it from the internet I'm not going to be too picky, unless I can find a dumb TV for cheaper.
We fouled up the transition if you only care about speed, and not security. In most of the world, pin+chip is recorded, and then the transaction gets balanced at a later time. It's possible to clone a thousand cards once you know the pin, and then execute multiple transactions against it. Eventually some system will check and it will be declined, but depending on how long it takes to finalize the transaction, you can steal a lot of money. In the US, it checks the balance before completing each transaction. That's what takes so long.
So the US is more secure, but it takes longer. I'm not sure that I'm willing to claim we fouled up the transition given that. Since the switch, I've had 0 fraud on my card. I used to get 1-2 fraud instances every year before this. Is that worth an extra 20 seconds at the check-out? I think so.
After the Note 7 nonsense, how can they not do a removable battery?
Because it's still cheaper to glue it in, when you sum up the cost across the entire product line to make all the batteries removable. And because only a small percentage of people will say
Make a phone disposable, and I'm much less interested
I thought I was one of those people when I had a Galaxy S4. I did like you and changed the batteries out, swapping multiple times per day when they got old. Always charging, removing, charging, removing. I got an S7 with a glued in battery, and so far I don't miss the removable batteries. The fast charge gets me 40% charge in 15 minutes, 80% charge in an hour, and that's plenty to keep me topped off. Wireless charging means I just drop the phone in the cradle. Compared to swapping batteries, it's sooooo much less effort. Sure, if I ever go backpacking for a few days it won't be as convenient, but for those sorts of one-off things I'll bring a charge pack or invest in a solar charger.
I really thought that I needed removable batteries, but a year plus into the S7, and that's still not the case.
Because your company isn't open to public scrutiny, and subject to political asshattery and abuse, that's why. And because your CEO or CIO can most likely approve that, without any additional oversight from other agencies or companies.
In the state I live in, several years back someone had an ax to grind with one of the government departments, and did an FOIA for all travel by all employees within that department, for the last three years. This FOIA included all their expenses. That person then totaled up the amounts, came up with crazy tales of waste and abuse, and sold that to the news.
The problem is that pulling together this information took weeks of time, because all PII had to be stripped from it, because reimbursement is tied to paychecks. So bunches of department employees had to consolidate all this, sanitize it, double-check that, and finally get it to the asshat in the format he requested. And once the asshat had sold his crazy tale, they had no way to really respond to the claims, because that would require even more time, because nobody has the job title, "PR To Counter Crazy Shit". For example, some of his complaints were that people were using all $40 of their per-diem meal expenses. Well, yeah. When you're flying somewhere, airport food eats into that really, really quickly. To think that $40 for three meals while traveling is wasteful you have to be someone who has never traveled.
All the department had the time to respond with was that all those expenses had been pre-approved, had receipts, and were signed off by 2-3 layers of management. That's already a crazy amount of bureaucracy. The fact that any random yahoo can add even more to it is really a problem.
How profitable could your company be if I could request the logs of every website visited in the last 2 years? How much staff time could I waste if I could just send an email asking for copies of all emails with "Thursday" in the subject? How much staff time if all your competitors could do it, as much as they wanted? And now imagine if they were able to ask for large chunks of information, and could use it in a PR campaign against you.
I'm not arguing for government obscurity, just sensible limits so that anyone with an ax to grind or a crazy conspiracy theory can't cost us piles more money and further increase the wasteful bureaucracy. We don't need random people micro-managing government employees. Anyone who has ever been micro-managed should understand this. There are sensible limits to government transparency which balance the need to understand what's going on with the ability for government employees to do their jobs.
And many apps aren't designed to fail gracefully without their expected permissions, and you get all sorts of wonky behavior. I get pretty regular popups in Google Mail because I didn't allow Google Play Services access to my wearable devices and location. Those popups tell me that Google Mail can't work properly because of issues in Google Play, and that I should go fix them. Except that Google Mail works just fine, once I dismiss the incessant popup telling me it doesn't. This has only been an issue for a year and a half, so it should be fixed soon, right?
More concerning than this is when such frivolous FOIAs are common, everyone resorts to not putting things in writing, or running everything past legal first. If you feel that government bureaucracy is bad now, if everyone was in CYA mode 100% of the time, it would be 10x worse.
I had one middle-manager who selectively put things in writing so as to not leave a paper trail for other things. It was pretty obvious, but it took extra time when we knew it was CYA time, as we'd need to sit down, summarize what he told us verbally, and send it to him in an email. At which point he'd reply with a "you misunderstood me", and spend more time spinning that into something totally different, which wouldn't come back to bite him in the ass later. While we waited on his "clarification". I don't want to see that sort of thing pervasive in government. Nor do I want to see a reversion back to verbal-only things, as that just leads to misunderstandings and wasted time.
That comes very, very close to describing me. Once I got past about 30, I started vetting jobs. I went in with the attitude that they wouldn't be interviewing me if they didn't think I was qualified, and it was now time for them to prove to me that I wanted to work there. I did my homework, knew a bit about the businesses, and had already asked about the general work in phone interviews. From there I dug into the job. The management structure, expectations, office culture, etc. What were their visions for this position? Challenges? Short and long-term goals?
And you know what? That apparently works. I'm 3/3 on jobs since I changed to that attitude, and I've been pretty happy with each one. There were no real surprises, no confusion regarding what I was expected to do. And in doing this I've been able to adjust their expectations for me. (No death-marches, more flexible hours, e.g.)
Yes, independently wealthy would be a step up, but that's about it. I might get a chance in another 5-10 years to get "fuck you money" offered to me, so I might decide the temporary pain would be worth it. Until then, I'm doing pretty well right where I am, because I put the effort in up front.
if it doesn't cost at minimum 2x as much as Netflicks [sic} and suck hard, I'll be really surprised. When the only way to watch some of the older Disney movies, Star Wars, and Marvel movies is their platform, they're going to squeeze people soooo hard..... I wouldn't be surprised if the blueray prices got bumped up as well, just to make sure that their streaming service looks a little more enticing.
I'm sticking by that, not because I'm an analyst in the field, but because Disney has a long, storied tradition of ripping customers off and squeezing every list cent out of things. The analyst gives no rational in this article for why $5, except "to drive adoption." BS that it's going to be $5. I don't even believe that it will be $5 for the intro rate, for the roll-out. Disney gives nothing away.
More than likely, the teachers have no idea how to appropriately integrate technology so that it supports learning rather than distracts from it. Educational theory has been around a lot longer than computers have. I'm not aware of a lot of teacher prep programs teaching teachers how to integrate technology. And even if they were doing this, those are soon-to-be teachers, not current ones. The current ones probably got a day long professional development seminar about integrating tech into schools, and then were turned loose to modify their curriculum and teaching style. The article sort-of hints at this, but it would be interesting to see a deeper study that breaks outcomes up by teacher prep.
Most of the time I'd agree, but we really don't need more morons writing code. I think this darwinian pressure on developers is a good thing for everyone. Hopefully he is forced to choose another career path after this.
I agree somewhat. But thin is nice if you're going to put a case on it. My wife went cheap on her latest phone, and it's noticeably thick once you put a decent case on it. The more expensive ones tend to not have that problem - I find my S7 with a case is a really nice thickness. Sure, you can also not put a case on your phone - I survived 3 years without one - but a case is not bad insurance.
Likewise, the need for water-resistant phones is a bit of insurance, but that need is heavily dependent on your lifestyle. Got kids? Water-resistant makes a phone really appealing. Hell, even with 2 cats I like the idea, because flying kitties do happen, and all it takes is one drink near the phone do to a little more than rain on it.
There was a time when I used to carry around a zip-lock bag, because I figured if it ever down-poured on me, it would be nice to have a phone-saving device. Only used it once, but was glad I had it. So yeah, water-resistant phones aren't really necessary, but I like knowing that a puddle, drink, or toilet shouldn't do much harm to my phone.
I loved my S4, and I loved the removable batteries. But the wear-and-tear on the phone changing them often was not trivial, and I spent a lot of time micro-managing my battery use and charging. I don't miss that, and with the fast-charge of the S7, I don't miss the removable batteries at all. 15 minutes of charge gets me like 40% battery, while an hour puts me well north of 80%. Wireless charging means I drop my phone on the cradle and walk away, making it even more hassle-free. I really thought I'd miss the removable batteries, but nope.
Sure, Note 7 would have been cheaper if they could have swapped the batteries, but would it have been cheaper than gluing in the batteries in the entire Note product line? If you make all your devices with removable batteries, they all cost more money, are harder to waterproof, thicker, and customers can stick dodgy spares into them anyway. If you glue batteries in the entire line, sure, maybe you have one expensive recall, but does it cost more than not doing that? I've got no idea, but I think it's simplistic to just use hindsight and call it a bad idea. Had they never had that one recall, hindsight would likely have called the glue a great, cost-saving idea.
Also as this is showing, people will try to cheap out when getting a replacement battery
I sort-of did when I had an S4. Went on to Amazon, put in the model number, and there were bunch of options. I got the best combo of price and shipping. Turns out that battery wasn't quite the same as the original. After some time, I kept finding that the battery life of my phone seemed a bit random, and sometimes it would get a little hot. Finally figured out that it might be the battery, marked it clearly, and then paid attention. Sure enough, the new battery was the flaky one. A close examination showed that it was definitely not quite the same as the original. Very, very close, but subtle differences in the printing.
It goes to show how far the Chinese counterfeiters will go to make a similar product. Or it's possible that this came from a batch that failed QC, but which were saved from the recycling bin and sold anyway. While I get the hate for glued-in batteries, I get the advantages of them as well. No risks that customers buy what seem to be ok spares but which turn out to be counterfeit, and you can better waterproof your phone if the user can't open it.
but where is the 'control' that probiotics specifically have contributed, and to what extent?
If you sin and RTFA, they note that the role of probiotics is unknown, as there wasn't this control group. And that given how well this worked, they are interested in exploring that. The obvious question was why not do these obvious controls at the time of experimentation, and the answer is generally that there weren't enough participants to split them that many ways and still meet the N size to have significance.
No, after four years is in the future, thus they are not able to observe it working. If they could observe the future, they wouldn't be in science, that's for sure.
Why would I be condemning anti-white speech, in a thread about neo-Nazi websites being forced offline after neo-Nazis assaulted a bunch of people and killed someone? That's what you seem to happily be ignoring, in the most hamfisted racist way.
We just had fucking Nazis with torches marching through a US city, bearing arms. Those Nazis called for the expulsion of non-Whites and people of religions they disagree with from the country. They chanted Nazi slogans, made comments about killing minorities, assaulted a bunch of people, and ultimately killed someone.
Nazis.
In the fucking USA, which beat those fascists bastards back early last century.
And after actual armed Nazis marched through a town assaulting people and calling for the rise of white nationalism, you and the GP are more concerned with some insensitive things some black protesters said?
Fuck you guys. If what happened this week isn't a bigger problem in your eyes, than you are just racist motherfuckers. You should be glad my grandpa is long dead, because he was damn proud of killing Nazis, and you and the rest would likely be on his "don't give a fuck at my age" list.
Congratulations on a magnificent deflection! You deserve a nice Nazi salute for that one!
You and the GP are all excited to play word-police, and try to draw parallels between fascists and black people. No, they don't sound equally fascist. If they do, it's because you apparently don't even know what a fascist is. Please, go educate yourself.
There are armed Nazi stormtroopers, carrying torches, chanting Nazi slogans, intimidating and assaulting people, and you want to play word police? "Blood and Soil" and "A lot of people are going to die here before we're done" lead to at least one death and a pile of injuries.
I'm not playing word police. This is about fascism. This is what fascism is, and what it does. What was crushed by our grandparents so many years ago is back, and it needs to be crushed again. If you want to be a racist and try to tie blacks to Nazis, congrats, you're part of the problem. Fascism is not about just saying shit that might be hateful. It's about state sponsored nationalism, and acting on those fascist beliefs. Just like we saw this past week. When intimidation and assault violate civil rights, we're not talking about hate speech anymore. And when the head of state comes out and can't really condemn that, it's scary as hell.
If a cornerstone of BLM was "kill all the white people", you still wouldn't have a point. The point of fascism is to drive change within the current political structure to support that nationalism. And not only are BLM not saying, "kill all the white people", they definitely aren't arguing that they should be taking over the political system to make that happen. So you and the GP, please stop being racist as fuck and tying black protest groups to fascists. It would be one tiny step forward towards solving some of our current problems.
That's where I'm baffled. If the place is empty and the line doesn't move, WTF? Never going back there. For that matter, why not just put free meal coupons on the app, and have all those people show up and get something to eat. Then it's full, and they might be convinced to write a nice review about the free stuff. Especially since it's tied to the app, and you can weed out the people who are too picky. That's more of a win for everyone than a dummy line.
You cannot define "hate" speech to just include white-supremacist or other speech you disagree with.
And I believe that I've pointed out how yes, fascist speech is one of those things you can just include on the "no, don't fucking do that" list. It's not a gray area. That's over the red line. We lost tens of millions of people the last time we allowed fascism to spread. That's plenty of evidence to say, "No, not again."
To equate something that destructive to the entire goddamn world to people fighting to reduce police brutality or fighting AGAINST that destructive force is nonsense. You'll note that the GP included a lot of quotes of people espousing hate. I don't disagree with the GP there. But what you can't equate are the actions of those people with the actions of fascists. You can't equate the goals of those people with the goals of fascists. If you, like the GP don't get that, I don't know what to say.
Are tens of millions of people dead the last time we let fascism take off not enough evidence that it's a bad thing? How do you not understand that Nazis are bad, and bad in a way that is not remotely similar to any of the other people or groups the GP mentioned? The last time we had fascism, we got genocide. The current fascists are proudly hoisting the symbols of that fascist regime, and espousing beliefs that are not yet quite genocide. Just like the last group of fascists.
As far as I'm aware, BLM has not a) advocated for genocide, b) have previously committed genocide, c) caused tens of millions of deaths around the world, or d) proudly displayed the symbols of the regime that once did that. Criticize them all you want, but don't equate them to Nazis, because they aren't remotely similar. But you know who are similar to the Nazis? Neo-Nazis. White Nationalists. White Power groups. You know, those groups that seem to be making up more and more of the Alt-Right as time goes on.
You claim I have an axe to grind, and yes, yes I do. With fascists. But it's clear that the GP has one with African-Americans, and he's dishonest enough to try to tie them to Nazis. It's sort-of mind-blowing how crazy that is.
I think where UBI shines most is in the inability to really game the system. Everyone gets the same amount, the same way. Paying for it, as you noted, gets tripped up by the same gaming of the tax system that has always gone on. It's looking like that is the only real hurdle to caring for society as a whole. Find the solution to taxation, and we then have the resources to fix everything else.
Go to open mic nights in coffee shops and perform slam poetry and crappy indie rock? Hot chili eating contests? How about the Red Bull thing where they jump off a pier into the ocean riding ridiculous things?
There are a lot of things that can't be automated in the world!
Or were you asking about profitable things that benefit society? If that's what you were asking about, I've got nothing, really. Best I can come up with is make-work projects involving community beautification, child care, education, art, etc. Nothing that can turn a profit and be self-funding, but things that could benefit society, provided they were government funded.
Did you miss the entire argument you are replying to? The argument was that the current low wages are not sufficient to meet the "I need to eat" criteria. Thus that is no longer an argument for low wages.
I've spent a couple of years supporting UBI here and elsewhere, but recently I've stated to rethink my position. We've got chronic unemployment for african-american men aged 18-25 around here. Something like 50%. No surprise, but that's the population that ends up with enough free time and desperation to resort to crime. However, we also have chronic unemployment for teens and young, non-college-bound adults in general. And not even the well-off, suburban white kids are immune from getting into trouble. Theirs isn't due to poverty and trying to claw their way out - theirs is boredom, pure and simple. Vandalism, arson, petty crime, drugs. Anything to break the monotony of everyday life. Giving people with this idle time and need for excitement more money but nothing to do doesn't seem to fix the problem.
Looking at the unemployed young folks in my community, it seems that lack of something to do might cause more problems than poverty itself. You don't generally get into a a fist-fight outside of a bar at closing time at 2am on a Tuesday when you need to be getting up to go to work at 6am. When 3 out of 4 of your friends are at work, you're potentially less likely to light the rubber chips on a playground on fire by yourself.
So while I still support the idea of UBI, I'm really starting to think that it's going to need to be make-work projects, rather than true UBI. That, or we need to pair UBI with a real culture shift where free time is directed at community and self-improvement, and come up with ways to compel this. The alternate is too many people bored out of their minds, who decide to make life interesting for themselves and others.
Slashdot Mirror
For my last TV, the "Smart" TVs were priced far cheaper for the same quality/features than any dumb monitor I could find when on sale. I bought the "Smart" TV, and tried using it. Blew me away that in 2017 when I can pinch zoom, swipe words, etc., that I was stuck arrowing around with a remote to type anything in any of the apps. What the hell? "Smart"?
And once I realized that my TV was also going to start trying to show me ads while using some of the apps, it got disconnected and I picked up a cheap mini-comp with HDMI for the brains instead. Wireless keyboard and mouse, and boom, Ubuntu runs everything I need it to, WINE picks up some slack, and it's all way faster, with less ads, and I don't run the risk of this BS where an update I can't control kills it off.
You may find it harder and harder to find a dumb TV as time goes on. As long as I can isolate it from the internet I'm not going to be too picky, unless I can find a dumb TV for cheaper.
We fouled up the transition if you only care about speed, and not security. In most of the world, pin+chip is recorded, and then the transaction gets balanced at a later time. It's possible to clone a thousand cards once you know the pin, and then execute multiple transactions against it. Eventually some system will check and it will be declined, but depending on how long it takes to finalize the transaction, you can steal a lot of money. In the US, it checks the balance before completing each transaction. That's what takes so long.
So the US is more secure, but it takes longer. I'm not sure that I'm willing to claim we fouled up the transition given that. Since the switch, I've had 0 fraud on my card. I used to get 1-2 fraud instances every year before this. Is that worth an extra 20 seconds at the check-out? I think so.
Ditto. The old adage, if over time you replace all the parts of a ship, at what point isn't it the same ship?
It's almost like Windows saw this coming and made Windows 10 in response.
Having held out for 18 months....
Humm......no, I know that MS can't work quite that fast....
After the Note 7 nonsense, how can they not do a removable battery?
Because it's still cheaper to glue it in, when you sum up the cost across the entire product line to make all the batteries removable. And because only a small percentage of people will say
Make a phone disposable, and I'm much less interested
I thought I was one of those people when I had a Galaxy S4. I did like you and changed the batteries out, swapping multiple times per day when they got old. Always charging, removing, charging, removing. I got an S7 with a glued in battery, and so far I don't miss the removable batteries. The fast charge gets me 40% charge in 15 minutes, 80% charge in an hour, and that's plenty to keep me topped off. Wireless charging means I just drop the phone in the cradle. Compared to swapping batteries, it's sooooo much less effort. Sure, if I ever go backpacking for a few days it won't be as convenient, but for those sorts of one-off things I'll bring a charge pack or invest in a solar charger.
I really thought that I needed removable batteries, but a year plus into the S7, and that's still not the case.
Because your company isn't open to public scrutiny, and subject to political asshattery and abuse, that's why. And because your CEO or CIO can most likely approve that, without any additional oversight from other agencies or companies.
In the state I live in, several years back someone had an ax to grind with one of the government departments, and did an FOIA for all travel by all employees within that department, for the last three years. This FOIA included all their expenses. That person then totaled up the amounts, came up with crazy tales of waste and abuse, and sold that to the news.
The problem is that pulling together this information took weeks of time, because all PII had to be stripped from it, because reimbursement is tied to paychecks. So bunches of department employees had to consolidate all this, sanitize it, double-check that, and finally get it to the asshat in the format he requested. And once the asshat had sold his crazy tale, they had no way to really respond to the claims, because that would require even more time, because nobody has the job title, "PR To Counter Crazy Shit". For example, some of his complaints were that people were using all $40 of their per-diem meal expenses. Well, yeah. When you're flying somewhere, airport food eats into that really, really quickly. To think that $40 for three meals while traveling is wasteful you have to be someone who has never traveled.
All the department had the time to respond with was that all those expenses had been pre-approved, had receipts, and were signed off by 2-3 layers of management. That's already a crazy amount of bureaucracy. The fact that any random yahoo can add even more to it is really a problem.
How profitable could your company be if I could request the logs of every website visited in the last 2 years? How much staff time could I waste if I could just send an email asking for copies of all emails with "Thursday" in the subject? How much staff time if all your competitors could do it, as much as they wanted? And now imagine if they were able to ask for large chunks of information, and could use it in a PR campaign against you.
I'm not arguing for government obscurity, just sensible limits so that anyone with an ax to grind or a crazy conspiracy theory can't cost us piles more money and further increase the wasteful bureaucracy. We don't need random people micro-managing government employees. Anyone who has ever been micro-managed should understand this. There are sensible limits to government transparency which balance the need to understand what's going on with the ability for government employees to do their jobs.
And many apps aren't designed to fail gracefully without their expected permissions, and you get all sorts of wonky behavior. I get pretty regular popups in Google Mail because I didn't allow Google Play Services access to my wearable devices and location. Those popups tell me that Google Mail can't work properly because of issues in Google Play, and that I should go fix them. Except that Google Mail works just fine, once I dismiss the incessant popup telling me it doesn't. This has only been an issue for a year and a half, so it should be fixed soon, right?
More concerning than this is when such frivolous FOIAs are common, everyone resorts to not putting things in writing, or running everything past legal first. If you feel that government bureaucracy is bad now, if everyone was in CYA mode 100% of the time, it would be 10x worse.
I had one middle-manager who selectively put things in writing so as to not leave a paper trail for other things. It was pretty obvious, but it took extra time when we knew it was CYA time, as we'd need to sit down, summarize what he told us verbally, and send it to him in an email. At which point he'd reply with a "you misunderstood me", and spend more time spinning that into something totally different, which wouldn't come back to bite him in the ass later. While we waited on his "clarification". I don't want to see that sort of thing pervasive in government. Nor do I want to see a reversion back to verbal-only things, as that just leads to misunderstandings and wasted time.
That comes very, very close to describing me. Once I got past about 30, I started vetting jobs. I went in with the attitude that they wouldn't be interviewing me if they didn't think I was qualified, and it was now time for them to prove to me that I wanted to work there. I did my homework, knew a bit about the businesses, and had already asked about the general work in phone interviews. From there I dug into the job. The management structure, expectations, office culture, etc. What were their visions for this position? Challenges? Short and long-term goals?
And you know what? That apparently works. I'm 3/3 on jobs since I changed to that attitude, and I've been pretty happy with each one. There were no real surprises, no confusion regarding what I was expected to do. And in doing this I've been able to adjust their expectations for me. (No death-marches, more flexible hours, e.g.)
Yes, independently wealthy would be a step up, but that's about it. I might get a chance in another 5-10 years to get "fuck you money" offered to me, so I might decide the temporary pain would be worth it. Until then, I'm doing pretty well right where I am, because I put the effort in up front.
When this news came out, I predicted
if it doesn't cost at minimum 2x as much as Netflicks [sic} and suck hard, I'll be really surprised. When the only way to watch some of the older Disney movies, Star Wars, and Marvel movies is their platform, they're going to squeeze people soooo hard..... I wouldn't be surprised if the blueray prices got bumped up as well, just to make sure that their streaming service looks a little more enticing.
I'm sticking by that, not because I'm an analyst in the field, but because Disney has a long, storied tradition of ripping customers off and squeezing every list cent out of things. The analyst gives no rational in this article for why $5, except "to drive adoption." BS that it's going to be $5. I don't even believe that it will be $5 for the intro rate, for the roll-out. Disney gives nothing away.
More than likely, the teachers have no idea how to appropriately integrate technology so that it supports learning rather than distracts from it. Educational theory has been around a lot longer than computers have. I'm not aware of a lot of teacher prep programs teaching teachers how to integrate technology. And even if they were doing this, those are soon-to-be teachers, not current ones. The current ones probably got a day long professional development seminar about integrating tech into schools, and then were turned loose to modify their curriculum and teaching style. The article sort-of hints at this, but it would be interesting to see a deeper study that breaks outcomes up by teacher prep.
Most of the time I'd agree, but we really don't need more morons writing code. I think this darwinian pressure on developers is a good thing for everyone. Hopefully he is forced to choose another career path after this.
I agree somewhat. But thin is nice if you're going to put a case on it. My wife went cheap on her latest phone, and it's noticeably thick once you put a decent case on it. The more expensive ones tend to not have that problem - I find my S7 with a case is a really nice thickness. Sure, you can also not put a case on your phone - I survived 3 years without one - but a case is not bad insurance.
Likewise, the need for water-resistant phones is a bit of insurance, but that need is heavily dependent on your lifestyle. Got kids? Water-resistant makes a phone really appealing. Hell, even with 2 cats I like the idea, because flying kitties do happen, and all it takes is one drink near the phone do to a little more than rain on it.
There was a time when I used to carry around a zip-lock bag, because I figured if it ever down-poured on me, it would be nice to have a phone-saving device. Only used it once, but was glad I had it. So yeah, water-resistant phones aren't really necessary, but I like knowing that a puddle, drink, or toilet shouldn't do much harm to my phone.
I loved my S4, and I loved the removable batteries. But the wear-and-tear on the phone changing them often was not trivial, and I spent a lot of time micro-managing my battery use and charging. I don't miss that, and with the fast-charge of the S7, I don't miss the removable batteries at all. 15 minutes of charge gets me like 40% battery, while an hour puts me well north of 80%. Wireless charging means I drop my phone on the cradle and walk away, making it even more hassle-free. I really thought I'd miss the removable batteries, but nope.
Sure, Note 7 would have been cheaper if they could have swapped the batteries, but would it have been cheaper than gluing in the batteries in the entire Note product line? If you make all your devices with removable batteries, they all cost more money, are harder to waterproof, thicker, and customers can stick dodgy spares into them anyway. If you glue batteries in the entire line, sure, maybe you have one expensive recall, but does it cost more than not doing that? I've got no idea, but I think it's simplistic to just use hindsight and call it a bad idea. Had they never had that one recall, hindsight would likely have called the glue a great, cost-saving idea.
Also as this is showing, people will try to cheap out when getting a replacement battery
I sort-of did when I had an S4. Went on to Amazon, put in the model number, and there were bunch of options. I got the best combo of price and shipping. Turns out that battery wasn't quite the same as the original. After some time, I kept finding that the battery life of my phone seemed a bit random, and sometimes it would get a little hot. Finally figured out that it might be the battery, marked it clearly, and then paid attention. Sure enough, the new battery was the flaky one. A close examination showed that it was definitely not quite the same as the original. Very, very close, but subtle differences in the printing.
It goes to show how far the Chinese counterfeiters will go to make a similar product. Or it's possible that this came from a batch that failed QC, but which were saved from the recycling bin and sold anyway. While I get the hate for glued-in batteries, I get the advantages of them as well. No risks that customers buy what seem to be ok spares but which turn out to be counterfeit, and you can better waterproof your phone if the user can't open it.
but where is the 'control' that probiotics specifically have contributed, and to what extent?
If you sin and RTFA, they note that the role of probiotics is unknown, as there wasn't this control group. And that given how well this worked, they are interested in exploring that. The obvious question was why not do these obvious controls at the time of experimentation, and the answer is generally that there weren't enough participants to split them that many ways and still meet the N size to have significance.
No, after four years is in the future, thus they are not able to observe it working. If they could observe the future, they wouldn't be in science, that's for sure.
Why would I be condemning anti-white speech, in a thread about neo-Nazi websites being forced offline after neo-Nazis assaulted a bunch of people and killed someone? That's what you seem to happily be ignoring, in the most hamfisted racist way.
We just had fucking Nazis with torches marching through a US city, bearing arms. Those Nazis called for the expulsion of non-Whites and people of religions they disagree with from the country. They chanted Nazi slogans, made comments about killing minorities, assaulted a bunch of people, and ultimately killed someone.
Nazis.
In the fucking USA, which beat those fascists bastards back early last century.
And after actual armed Nazis marched through a town assaulting people and calling for the rise of white nationalism, you and the GP are more concerned with some insensitive things some black protesters said?
Fuck you guys. If what happened this week isn't a bigger problem in your eyes, than you are just racist motherfuckers. You should be glad my grandpa is long dead, because he was damn proud of killing Nazis, and you and the rest would likely be on his "don't give a fuck at my age" list.
Congratulations on a magnificent deflection! You deserve a nice Nazi salute for that one!
You and the GP are all excited to play word-police, and try to draw parallels between fascists and black people. No, they don't sound equally fascist. If they do, it's because you apparently don't even know what a fascist is. Please, go educate yourself.
There are armed Nazi stormtroopers, carrying torches, chanting Nazi slogans, intimidating and assaulting people, and you want to play word police? "Blood and Soil" and "A lot of people are going to die here before we're done" lead to at least one death and a pile of injuries.
I'm not playing word police. This is about fascism. This is what fascism is, and what it does. What was crushed by our grandparents so many years ago is back, and it needs to be crushed again. If you want to be a racist and try to tie blacks to Nazis, congrats, you're part of the problem. Fascism is not about just saying shit that might be hateful. It's about state sponsored nationalism, and acting on those fascist beliefs. Just like we saw this past week. When intimidation and assault violate civil rights, we're not talking about hate speech anymore. And when the head of state comes out and can't really condemn that, it's scary as hell.
If a cornerstone of BLM was "kill all the white people", you still wouldn't have a point. The point of fascism is to drive change within the current political structure to support that nationalism. And not only are BLM not saying, "kill all the white people", they definitely aren't arguing that they should be taking over the political system to make that happen. So you and the GP, please stop being racist as fuck and tying black protest groups to fascists. It would be one tiny step forward towards solving some of our current problems.
That's where I'm baffled. If the place is empty and the line doesn't move, WTF? Never going back there. For that matter, why not just put free meal coupons on the app, and have all those people show up and get something to eat. Then it's full, and they might be convinced to write a nice review about the free stuff. Especially since it's tied to the app, and you can weed out the people who are too picky. That's more of a win for everyone than a dummy line.
The GP said,
You cannot define "hate" speech to just include white-supremacist or other speech you disagree with.
And I believe that I've pointed out how yes, fascist speech is one of those things you can just include on the "no, don't fucking do that" list. It's not a gray area. That's over the red line. We lost tens of millions of people the last time we allowed fascism to spread. That's plenty of evidence to say, "No, not again."
To equate something that destructive to the entire goddamn world to people fighting to reduce police brutality or fighting AGAINST that destructive force is nonsense. You'll note that the GP included a lot of quotes of people espousing hate. I don't disagree with the GP there. But what you can't equate are the actions of those people with the actions of fascists. You can't equate the goals of those people with the goals of fascists. If you, like the GP don't get that, I don't know what to say.
Are tens of millions of people dead the last time we let fascism take off not enough evidence that it's a bad thing? How do you not understand that Nazis are bad, and bad in a way that is not remotely similar to any of the other people or groups the GP mentioned? The last time we had fascism, we got genocide. The current fascists are proudly hoisting the symbols of that fascist regime, and espousing beliefs that are not yet quite genocide. Just like the last group of fascists.
As far as I'm aware, BLM has not a) advocated for genocide, b) have previously committed genocide, c) caused tens of millions of deaths around the world, or d) proudly displayed the symbols of the regime that once did that. Criticize them all you want, but don't equate them to Nazis, because they aren't remotely similar. But you know who are similar to the Nazis? Neo-Nazis. White Nationalists. White Power groups. You know, those groups that seem to be making up more and more of the Alt-Right as time goes on.
You claim I have an axe to grind, and yes, yes I do. With fascists. But it's clear that the GP has one with African-Americans, and he's dishonest enough to try to tie them to Nazis. It's sort-of mind-blowing how crazy that is.
I think where UBI shines most is in the inability to really game the system. Everyone gets the same amount, the same way. Paying for it, as you noted, gets tripped up by the same gaming of the tax system that has always gone on. It's looking like that is the only real hurdle to caring for society as a whole. Find the solution to taxation, and we then have the resources to fix everything else.
Go to open mic nights in coffee shops and perform slam poetry and crappy indie rock? Hot chili eating contests? How about the Red Bull thing where they jump off a pier into the ocean riding ridiculous things?
There are a lot of things that can't be automated in the world!
Or were you asking about profitable things that benefit society? If that's what you were asking about, I've got nothing, really. Best I can come up with is make-work projects involving community beautification, child care, education, art, etc. Nothing that can turn a profit and be self-funding, but things that could benefit society, provided they were government funded.
AKA the bootstrap and temporarily displaced millionaire delusion.
Did you miss the entire argument you are replying to? The argument was that the current low wages are not sufficient to meet the "I need to eat" criteria. Thus that is no longer an argument for low wages.
I've spent a couple of years supporting UBI here and elsewhere, but recently I've stated to rethink my position. We've got chronic unemployment for african-american men aged 18-25 around here. Something like 50%. No surprise, but that's the population that ends up with enough free time and desperation to resort to crime. However, we also have chronic unemployment for teens and young, non-college-bound adults in general. And not even the well-off, suburban white kids are immune from getting into trouble. Theirs isn't due to poverty and trying to claw their way out - theirs is boredom, pure and simple. Vandalism, arson, petty crime, drugs. Anything to break the monotony of everyday life. Giving people with this idle time and need for excitement more money but nothing to do doesn't seem to fix the problem.
Looking at the unemployed young folks in my community, it seems that lack of something to do might cause more problems than poverty itself. You don't generally get into a a fist-fight outside of a bar at closing time at 2am on a Tuesday when you need to be getting up to go to work at 6am. When 3 out of 4 of your friends are at work, you're potentially less likely to light the rubber chips on a playground on fire by yourself.
So while I still support the idea of UBI, I'm really starting to think that it's going to need to be make-work projects, rather than true UBI. That, or we need to pair UBI with a real culture shift where free time is directed at community and self-improvement, and come up with ways to compel this. The alternate is too many people bored out of their minds, who decide to make life interesting for themselves and others.