I think you start to realize the fiscal challenges as soon as you consider the idea of starting your own competitor to Facebook. I mean, take a look at your costs to hire a development team that works on the software itself, and find out what your annual costs will be for the bandwidth needed, for the physical servers and storage devices, etc. Now, assume you really ARE going to keep everyone's personal information secure and private on YOUR social media alternative -- so none of what they upload or key in is ever sold.
Are you still confident you can generate enough revenue selling some advertising space on your site to cover all those bills and actually turn a profit? I sure wouldn't be.
I just got cited by an electrical inspector because a circuit that runs through buried PVC doesn't have its PVC buried deep enough between my house and my detached garage. It's probably 8" or so below the ground, with a concrete sidewalk running over the top of it. But the code states it must be buried a full 18".
So Google thought fiber was ok to just shove 2 inches below the roadway?!
I sometimes wonder if the Google Fiber project was MEANT to fail - so Google could experiment with a bunch of stuff related to deploying it and then pull out again?
You're sure quick to call me ignorant without knowing anything about my personal experience dealing with the subject?
For the record though? Yes, on multiple occasions, I went through the process of contacting Apple to get a device unlocked. In those cases, I was eventually able to get it done in 2 of 3 situations encountered -- but it was not easy or quick, by any means.
When it was successful, it involved me contacting my account manager at the company who originally sold our company the iPad, and having them contact the rep at Apple, so they could provide Apple with proof that we did, indeed, purchase it through them. (It's a lot less convoluted if you purchased from Apple direct, but that's often not the smartest financial decision, when almost all the other vendors are more likely to have discounted prices on their items.) Then, we had to wait at least a week to two weeks for Apple to get around to actually unlocking the device for us.
In the case where I wasn't successful, it was because Apple claimed to have no record that we purchased the product, and we couldn't turn up suitable proof that we did either. (Very likely, this was a "one off" purchase that someone in I.T. made using a corporate credit card when it was needed in a rush for a last minute hire. It would be kind of a needle in a haystack trying to sift through every credit card purchase made by the I.T. staff over a time window when it would most likely have been purchased. Wasn't worth the hassle for an old, now obsolete model of iPad that had a mostly worn out battery in it anyway.)
With Android devices, I have real recent experience and frustration trying to help a neighbor out. His son had a new Android phone that he was locked out of. Looks to me like a hacker got ahold of his Gmail login and changed the password to it, effectively locking him out of the phone which was prompting for said password in order to reset it. Google was utterly useless in assisting. They just have an automated system that promises it will forward your info on to someone to consider resetting your account if you provide sufficient evidence you really owned the original account. It asked for a few things like the month and year the Gmail account was first set up. (How many people remember that, I wonder? This guy actually knew because he made the account somewhat recently, just for his kid to use....) Still, after a month of trying to get help with it, Google never reset it for him so the phone's still a paperweight.
I did find a few hackers who offer the service of unlocking these phones for a $10 or so fee. I may point him that direction.... But it's crazy you have to rely on hackers and pay them to unlock devices that the companies involved with locking them refuse to help with.
Jaguar's i-Pace and Audi's E-Tron are probably the two vehicles furthest along to production that are a fair comparison to Tesla's offerings.
I think VW is going to go "all in" on trying to sell electric vehicles largely because they know it's a way to redeem the brand, after dieselgate pretty much crushed them. If you're suddenly focused on "clean and Green" products, you can peddle what you're selling to a whole new audience.... I have little reason to believe what they'll come up with will interest me much.
The pathetic thing with Chevrolet is that they really seemed like they were onto something with the Volt first, and then the Bolt which qualifies as a true EV -- and one with respectable range and active battery temperature control. (The later is a major downfall of many of the others like the Leaf, which suffer from premature battery failure, especially in conditions like owners who live on the top of steep hills.) Yet, Chevy turned its back on all of it, last I heard. Maybe it just realized it wasn't really able to mass manufacture Bolt-like cars without subsidies and still turn a profit?
Somehow, I find it difficult to believe Elon Musk *really* put all the effort his did into Tesla because he felt it was necessary to help counter climate change.
(And frankly, if he did? That's kind of sad, because he should be intelligent and scientifically aware enough to realize that the number of Teslas his company could produce over a decade's time is little more than a drop in the bucket of the total number of machines out there burning fossil fuels. And that's not even factoring in how many fossil fuels are burnt to generate a portion of the electricity used to charge these cars.)
Personally, I think he was just a shrewd enough businessman to realize that "Green" promises sell, even when your product is relatively costly and doesn't quite make economic sense on its own. It's telling that the very first car he sold was a 2 seater sports car; not something practical. Tesla has *really* always been about driving something futuristic, high-tech and cool, with high performance. As far as efficiency per watt of power used goes, it doesn't really do that well vs. many other electric cars. That's never been the focus....
I really haven't found that free-market libertarian ideals leave me "empty" in the slightest... They're still, IMO, the single best and most just way to encourage people to be productive, and to reward that productivity.
Consumerism is only an issue to the extent individuals ALLOW it to be. For example? If Pepsi goes through with this and the bulk of the comments and stories written about it after the fact are negative? They're probably not going to do it again. Successful marketing doesn't involve angering your target audience.
Furthermore -- if these orbiting billboards disrupt astronomy around the globe, it won't take long before there's push-back against the Russian company responsible for putting up the satellites in the first place.
This is one of those problems that solves itself. This is just another of MANY attempts to do something new and attention-getting to market products or services, and it won't be financially viable if the majority expresses a strong dislike for it.
I first learned about libertarian ideals from some of the early Internet users/frequent message posters. IMO, the computer-savvy have always been a bastion of libertarian thought.
I think you have an awful lot of younger people entering the tech workforce, now, who really haven't even given politics that much consideration. For them, it's about "hating Orange man Trump" because that's an easy bandwagon to get on.... and after that? You hear a lot from our "Democratic Socialists" about promises they'll solve their anxiety over money and how they'll pay for things like big student loans or health insurance costs. So they latch on to that platform.
Really though? I think the libertarian aspects of the Internet stemmed more from the vision early users had of it being this empowering form of communication. All of a sudden, you could talk to someone on the other side of the planet, just as easily (and inexpensively!) as talking to your neighbor next door who got online. Once you're no longer tethered to a long distance phone provider who billed you by the minute for a voice call, based on which country you dialed -- you have a new type of freedom. And that ALSO enabled the ability for anyone to become their own online publisher -- producing content that was in reach of any Internet user, the world over.
The fact that some of the tech businesses out there exploit their workforce doesn't mean technology ITSELF helped prove libertarian ideas a failure!
I think at least in America, we need to remember that our government is not and has never been libertarian in nature. The closest it's ever come were a couple of Republican presidents (like Ronald Reagan) who made some very libertarian quotes -- but didn't really do a lot of very libertarian things, politically, to change the system in place.
There was recently a YouTube video I watched where a CEO in the auto industry did some "best guess" cost estimates on what Tesla was really spending to build its vehicles.
His belief was that the $35K Model 3 was probably at or near a "break even" point, IF it was built in the USA. The big differentiator would be if Tesla opted to build it in China instead, where he estimated it could then sell at $35K while still making at least a 15-20% profit margin.
I suspect that's the issue with selling a base Model 3 right now; at $35,000 - Tesla isn't making anything on the car. They probably JUST barely achieved break-even at that cost, right now, so it doesn't benefit them to sell the cars at that price EXCEPT for the hope they'll make some profit down the road, as people pay Tesla to enable the disabled features on it.
With them in kind of a cash crunch as of late, it's not that appealing to produce vehicles that only potentially make them a future $5,000 or $8,000 profit. So yeah, they'll sell it to you if you ask for it specifically -- but they don't want to really market it to people or make it easy to get one configured that way.
Lots of seat of the pants changes and decisions that quickly get pulled back, as of late. Of course, the pundits are coming out of the woodwork, declaring this indicates Tesla really is on its death-bed and about to fail, etc.
I suspect some of thing happens in other businesses all the time, but nobody notices -- because when it's a more mundane product like a can of soup or a new pair of pliers, there aren't all the eyes on it.
In any case, I think THIS change isn't a big deal. I agree that most sensible car buyers are going to opt to pay the $39,500 for this "Standard Plus" configuration of the Model 3 if they could afford the $35K for the base model. I mean, why wouldn't you when you don't even get the autopilot features Teslas are noted for if you go for the absolute cheapest one? Longer battery life and some extras like heated seats enabled too? You're going to do a lot better at resale time than you will trying to get someone to buy your used Model 3 base edition.
Where I work, we used to deploy new iPads to all new full-time employees, when they started a division that developed software apps for the platform. We wound up with a number of useless paperweights when employees turned them in upon leaving but neglected to follow our instructions to unlock them for us first.
Since then, sure -- we implemented tools to manage them ourselves with MDM, so that problem is behind us. (Heck, we stopped issuing them out anyway - because we restructured things and no longer do that app development.)
But I agree that the locked devices create a lot of senseless e-waste. No matter how simple Apple makes the process for someone to deauthorize/unlock it before before passing it on to the next person -- there are going to be a lot of situations where that step just doesn't happen.
It's frustrating that Apple (and for that matter, all the Android phones that do the same thing with Google logins) assume "Theft!" as the immediate go-to answer. I'd prefer theft to be something NOT assumed until they're told one happened. EG. Keep the current system in place BUT allow anyone to call in or email the right people to request it be unlocked for re-activation. If there's not a flag on that device's serial number saying someone already reported it stolen, do the unlock.
Pawn shops handled this, long ago, by requiring you give them your drivers' license to photocopy and keep on file whenever you pawn something. Then, if it turns out you gave them stolen merchandise, they know who to go back to. Apple, Samsung and others could do that same -- keeping your info on file as the one who requested the unlock.
I really expected Washington DC to be on that list of top cities too. The District is such a pain to drive around, most people seem to just navigate it the way I do when I'm out there; take the Metro to the nearest station and walk the rest of the way. If you need to carry around any large items/boxes though? Uber is your friend.
I see a whole lot of Uber hailing going on in DC though, thanks to all the bars and nightclubs, with people who had too much to drink, plus all the "important people" who need to get around from point A to B while not breaking a sweat or getting their nice suit dirty.
Personally, I do everything I can to avoid taking Uber and to date, I've never used Lyft (though their app is still on my phone, just in case). I think the service itself is a great idea, and I love how it disrupted the old-school and stale cab business. I just don't like paying that much to be taken relatively short distances. I spend all the money involved in owning my own vehicle and I'd prefer to use it in most situations.
I bought a couple of Alexas but I set up one of them in my office, where it's generally pretty quiet and where I'm only there a few days per week anyway. That unit is not going to hear anything but silence 99% of the time. I like it for the convenience of asking it things like how my commute home is looking, traffic-wise, or what the weather forecast is going to be for the rest of the day.
The other one is still in the box, unopened. (They had a sale where you got a pair of them for under $50 so it just seemed to make sense to do that.) I may resell it or something.
Well.... I, for one, can't think of anything smarter than trying to supply the demand that's out there with a business. Do I think this is just insanity, trying to impose these artificial restrictions on carbon emissions? Why yes.... yes I do.
I mean, this volcano in Mexico is suddenly erupting over and over after having been dormant for the last half century or more:
That, alone, probably contributes more to emissions than all of the motor vehicles they're so concerned about. (Nobody's putting emissions control systems on volcanoes, folks!)
But humans are prone to knee-jerk reactions and illogical behavior, as well as mistakenly making big efforts at solving problems that just aren't effective. This is nothing new! If some of our world governments think the way forward is penalizing people for selling gasoline powered vehicles? Then yeah - it's GREAT that an American car maker (Tesla) was ready to sell an electric alternative that's actually a pretty nice car. I bought one myself, and that was WITHOUT getting a govt. tax credit for doing it, or because my U.S. government made the gasoline powered choices far more costly.... I just bought it because I liked the technology in it and loved the performance.
Seriously.... it's amazingly bad, how often online conversations or comments on social media devolve into utter garbage. I imagine in this instance, it was egged on because of the political topic of discussion. Furthermore? I'm fairly confident the vast majority of "white supremacist" comments were made by teenagers trying to get a rise out of people.
I mean, sure -- you really DO have these racist hate groups around. But they're generally rather disorganized or lack enough membership to do anything significant. You have FAR more people who are just angry and like to talk trash than you do people who are truly committed to promoting neo-nazis or some kind of white supremacy movement.
I mean -- even if I happily accept that a poor diet is the leading cause of premature death? They claim that low consumption of fruits is one of the major problems. One of the first things I hear from dieticians trying to solve obesity problems is to curb one's intake of fruit juices, because they contain so much natural sugar and calories.
I'm sure the fruits themselves are better for you than drinking fruit juice... but even so? What part of a balanced diet is so contingent on eating fruit? It seems to me you could get most of the same vitamin and mineral benefits from a good selection of vegetables - not to mention all the "vitamin fortified" products out there like our cereals.
I think a lot of kids don't realize how different a skill-set is required to write good code vs becoming a good gamer. They just really enjoy playing their favorite video games and think it would be cool to have their name on the credits as someone who actually made one of them.
Honestly, video games have become such large productions these days, I suspect they're more like creating Hollywood movies than anything else. If you're a really good artist and can draw the kinds of creatures, characters and backgrounds a game needs, you might be more employable doing that than just being a coder? Same thing for someone good at composing soundtracks for a game title, or someone good at doing voice-overs.
As many people are pointing out here? Most titles today are using off the shelf engines to handle the bulk of the grunt work, so making unique games is more about filling in that audio and visual content than coding the skeleton.
If you assume that one of the goals for raising kids is for them to become productive members of society? Then yes, such claims as a video game "damaging childrens' education" qualifies in spades as an economic drain!
There are SO many things I couldn't find on Netflix to stream... Random mentions of a 20-40 year old movie that "I gotta check out!", courtesy of a friend or co-worker, for example. But on physical DVD, they seem to have just about anything I can think of to rent.
I have a problem with that conclusion you came to at the end of all of that.
"It would be far smarter to just have better welfare systems."?
The more social welfare a government provides, the more it's going to be motivated to apply various taxes and fees to pay for it. And meanwhile, you've created a disincentive to provide as high a quality of medical care as possible. (As always happens when one is employed by the State, or contracted by the State -- there's much less fear of job loss for doing a lesser quality of work.) In the U.S. - healthcare has never *truly* been a free market proposition. There's too much regulation and even favoritism given to big pharma, for one thing. But at least the majority of doctor/patient interactions still happen within a system where a given facility is privately owned and operated, and doctors make it or don't make it based on their own merits and ability to make patients happy.
The conclusion I get from all of your statistics is that we need much less government involvement in our lives, all the way around.
Fortnite is FAR less of an economic drain for the U.K. than the continued waste of having a pointless "Royal Family" monarchy that doesn't even serve a real political purpose anymore!
But that said? I gave Fortnite a try and the game held my interest for no more than an hour or two. I know they keep downloading regular updates to it, so it's possible if I got in the mood to play again, I'd enjoy another hour or so of game-play in it? But I already paid to purchase PUBG first, when it was all the rage -- and played it a bit until I got bored with it. So Fortnite *really* just felt like another PUBG after that.
I see no reason it's any more addictive than any other online game? It just depends what an individual finds the most entertaining and compelling to play, and how much free time they have to invest in gaming. Sure, many kids or teens get hooked on video games and spend too much time on them. But the same parents who gripe about such things are often seen spending too much of their own time at casinos, gambling, or doing other things we could say are "bad for you" and should be banned. In the end, it's simply part of being human.
First off? I think wages and benefits absolutely have to be appropriate for the location of the job. With the cost of living as high as it is out in California, I would think Google would have already been paying contract workers at least $15/hr. wages or so?
But overall, I really dislike this push to make the $15/hr. wage a LEGAL mandated minimum. If a business does it voluntarily? Well, great. That's how things are supposed to work. But here in Maryland, they just pushed the $15/hr. wage law through (although it doesn't take effect immediately, and there are a few exceptions for specific work situations). And already, the feedback I've heard from small business owners is really telling. Either they're starting to look at options to move out of the state and do business elsewhere, or they're trying to find ways to hire fewer people or cutting hours to make up the difference, because they can't stay profitable while paying everyone that as a starting wage.
The problem out here is, it's already very costly and difficult to run a business. If everything else was equal, maybe the $15/hr. wage would be possible to do. But the businesses around me are only here because they had to take out big loans to get up and running, and profitability is in the FAR distant future for them. Your rank and file workers just see the money coming in and think it's unfair they don't get a bigger cut of those proceeds. What they don't see is the fact that ALL of their pay is coming from a loan the owner is trying to pay back with interest. And things like city inspectors inconsistently enforcing the laws really adds to the difficulty. (EG. We have a couple guys here who took out a $150,000 loan to open a microbrewery in what was originally an old fire house. They quickly realized that most of their customers wanted to eat while sampling the beers there, but they couldn't afford the whole process involved to cook food in the building for people. So they started inviting food trucks to come out to their property regularly. That lasted about a month, and then the city got involved, saying the food trucks weren't allowed unless it was a special festival or event. Then, they tried to renovate the whole, unused, second floor of the fire house (which was once a dance hall). They wanted to rent it out for special events like weddings or have concerts there. Well -- again, the city said no, because the new building inspector decided it needs a $100,000 fire suppression system with sprinklers installed first for safety. (The original inspector they asked about it a year earlier said it would be no problem as long as occupancy was kept under 900 people and a fire alarm was installed. He installed the fire alarm already.)
I know this is getting a little off topic, but my point is just to illustrate the kind of challenges that get put in people's way, when they're just trying to run a successful business that employs others. That's before even talking about things like employment taxes. I really believe wages are set adequately without government intervention. Nobody will accept a job if the wage is too low, and sensible employers want to hire and train people who stick around a while. But there are valid reasons someone might be only offering $10-12/hr. vs $15... and there are plenty of people who are really only worth the $10-12 anyway. (Our kids just turning 17 who want a first job would be examples.)
But agree with the people who say this is a garbage story. I mean, wow.... Users sync their car with their cellphone so it has a copy of their contacts and calendars, but are all surprised that data was still there if their car gets resold or wrecked and they don't erase it first? Ok....
And yeah, a whole LOT of cars on the road today have a "black box" in them that keeps a snapshot of the last 10 seconds or so before a crash of exactly what the driver did. It may not have camera video, but info on the car's speed, steering, braking, etc. is sure stored there.
Anyone actually surprised they can look at data like a previous owner's GPS destinations is simply not even thinking. Especially with big auto auction houses, it's kind of unreasonable to demand THEY factory reset every car that comes in -- or heck, even just every Tesla that comes in. It's not their responsibility to protect someone else's data. It might even make a car worth a lot more money, if it's certifiably a celebrity of some kind who owned it last? People pay a lot for some weird things.
I recently tried to upgrade an older HP Probook 4520s that originally came with Windows 7. Windows 10 worked just fine on it when I install directly from a DVD with build 1803 on it. But the upgrade to 1809 consistently crashed it, so it would begin booting normally but hit a black screen and total system freeze before you ever got to a login prompt. I tried all the tricks, like installing the 1809 upgrade from a bootable USB stick with that Win 10 build already on it. No go.
I wound up having to tell it to postpone the 1809 upgrade for 365 days (the longest time period Windows 10 lets you specify), so the computer could keep working.
I guess it'll be great if the next build addresses the issue and lets me just skip over 1809. But I'm not sure how much they care about specific, older laptops like this one - when HP themselves dropped support for it after Windows 8?
On the original site, a comment points out how this is probably a bad deal for the creator/owner of the music, considering there's no advance paid out. With that royalty split arrangement, he stands to make a lot less profit than he would have by just cranking out music "with the click of a button" ease and putting it on streaming sites himself. Why get signed to a label at all?
This is more a publicity stunt than a lucrative deal for the artist OR for Warner Music, really (since this stuff isn't getting downloaded more than in the "hundreds of times" to maybe 1000 or so downloads, tops).
There have been plenty of computer programs that try to write their own music, with varying levels of success. But in most cases, they at least provide a "skeleton" framework of a song idea that someone can massage into a listenable, original tune. I think we're still far from the point where AI can make a song that the masses find "catchy" enough so it makes big sales numbers and becomes a true hit.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you start to realize the fiscal challenges as soon as you consider the idea of starting your own competitor to Facebook. I mean, take a look at your costs to hire a development team that works on the software itself, and find out what your annual costs will be for the bandwidth needed, for the physical servers and storage devices, etc. Now, assume you really ARE going to keep everyone's personal information secure and private on YOUR social media alternative -- so none of what they upload or key in is ever sold.
Are you still confident you can generate enough revenue selling some advertising space on your site to cover all those bills and actually turn a profit?
I sure wouldn't be.
I just got cited by an electrical inspector because a circuit that runs through buried PVC doesn't have its PVC buried deep enough between my house and my detached garage. It's probably 8" or so below the ground, with a concrete sidewalk running over the top of it. But the code states it must be buried a full 18".
So Google thought fiber was ok to just shove 2 inches below the roadway?!
I sometimes wonder if the Google Fiber project was MEANT to fail - so Google could experiment with a bunch of stuff related to deploying it and then pull out again?
You're sure quick to call me ignorant without knowing anything about my personal experience dealing with the subject?
For the record though? Yes, on multiple occasions, I went through the process of contacting Apple to get a device unlocked. In those cases, I was eventually able to get it done in 2 of 3 situations encountered -- but it was not easy or quick, by any means.
When it was successful, it involved me contacting my account manager at the company who originally sold our company the iPad, and having them contact the rep at Apple, so they could provide Apple with proof that we did, indeed, purchase it through them. (It's a lot less convoluted if you purchased from Apple direct, but that's often not the smartest financial decision, when almost all the other vendors are more likely to have discounted prices on their items.) Then, we had to wait at least a week to two weeks for Apple to get around to actually unlocking the device for us.
In the case where I wasn't successful, it was because Apple claimed to have no record that we purchased the product, and we couldn't turn up suitable proof that we did either. (Very likely, this was a "one off" purchase that someone in I.T. made using a corporate credit card when it was needed in a rush for a last minute hire. It would be kind of a needle in a haystack trying to sift through every credit card purchase made by the I.T. staff over a time window when it would most likely have been purchased. Wasn't worth the hassle for an old, now obsolete model of iPad that had a mostly worn out battery in it anyway.)
With Android devices, I have real recent experience and frustration trying to help a neighbor out. His son had a new Android phone that he was locked out of. Looks to me like a hacker got ahold of his Gmail login and changed the password to it, effectively locking him out of the phone which was prompting for said password in order to reset it. Google was utterly useless in assisting. They just have an automated system that promises it will forward your info on to someone to consider resetting your account if you provide sufficient evidence you really owned the original account. It asked for a few things like the month and year the Gmail account was first set up. (How many people remember that, I wonder? This guy actually knew because he made the account somewhat recently, just for his kid to use....) Still, after a month of trying to get help with it, Google never reset it for him so the phone's still a paperweight.
I did find a few hackers who offer the service of unlocking these phones for a $10 or so fee. I may point him that direction.... But it's crazy you have to rely on hackers and pay them to unlock devices that the companies involved with locking them refuse to help with.
Jaguar's i-Pace and Audi's E-Tron are probably the two vehicles furthest along to production that are a fair comparison to Tesla's offerings.
I think VW is going to go "all in" on trying to sell electric vehicles largely because they know it's a way to redeem the brand, after dieselgate pretty much crushed them. If you're suddenly focused on "clean and Green" products, you can peddle what you're selling to a whole new audience.... I have little reason to believe what they'll come up with will interest me much.
The pathetic thing with Chevrolet is that they really seemed like they were onto something with the Volt first, and then the Bolt which qualifies as a true EV -- and one with respectable range and active battery temperature control. (The later is a major downfall of many of the others like the Leaf, which suffer from premature battery failure, especially in conditions like owners who live on the top of steep hills.) Yet, Chevy turned its back on all of it, last I heard. Maybe it just realized it wasn't really able to mass manufacture Bolt-like cars without subsidies and still turn a profit?
Somehow, I find it difficult to believe Elon Musk *really* put all the effort his did into Tesla because he felt it was necessary to help counter climate change.
(And frankly, if he did? That's kind of sad, because he should be intelligent and scientifically aware enough to realize that the number of Teslas his company could produce over a decade's time is little more than a drop in the bucket of the total number of machines out there burning fossil fuels. And that's not even factoring in how many fossil fuels are burnt to generate a portion of the electricity used to charge these cars.)
Personally, I think he was just a shrewd enough businessman to realize that "Green" promises sell, even when your product is relatively costly and doesn't quite make economic sense on its own. It's telling that the very first car he sold was a 2 seater sports car; not something practical. Tesla has *really* always been about driving something futuristic, high-tech and cool, with high performance. As far as efficiency per watt of power used goes, it doesn't really do that well vs. many other electric cars. That's never been the focus....
I really haven't found that free-market libertarian ideals leave me "empty" in the slightest... They're still, IMO, the single best and most just way to encourage people to be productive, and to reward that productivity.
Consumerism is only an issue to the extent individuals ALLOW it to be. For example? If Pepsi goes through with this and the bulk of the comments and stories written about it after the fact are negative? They're probably not going to do it again. Successful marketing doesn't involve angering your target audience.
Furthermore -- if these orbiting billboards disrupt astronomy around the globe, it won't take long before there's push-back against the Russian company responsible for putting up the satellites in the first place.
This is one of those problems that solves itself. This is just another of MANY attempts to do something new and attention-getting to market products or services, and it won't be financially viable if the majority expresses a strong dislike for it.
I first learned about libertarian ideals from some of the early Internet users/frequent message posters. IMO, the computer-savvy have always been a bastion of libertarian thought.
I think you have an awful lot of younger people entering the tech workforce, now, who really haven't even given politics that much consideration. For them, it's about "hating Orange man Trump" because that's an easy bandwagon to get on.... and after that? You hear a lot from our "Democratic Socialists" about promises they'll solve their anxiety over money and how they'll pay for things like big student loans or health insurance costs. So they latch on to that platform.
Really though? I think the libertarian aspects of the Internet stemmed more from the vision early users had of it being this empowering form of communication. All of a sudden, you could talk to someone on the other side of the planet, just as easily (and inexpensively!) as talking to your neighbor next door who got online. Once you're no longer tethered to a long distance phone provider who billed you by the minute for a voice call, based on which country you dialed -- you have a new type of freedom. And that ALSO enabled the ability for anyone to become their own online publisher -- producing content that was in reach of any Internet user, the world over.
The fact that some of the tech businesses out there exploit their workforce doesn't mean technology ITSELF helped prove libertarian ideas a failure!
I think at least in America, we need to remember that our government is not and has never been libertarian in nature. The closest it's ever come were a couple of Republican presidents (like Ronald Reagan) who made some very libertarian quotes -- but didn't really do a lot of very libertarian things, politically, to change the system in place.
There was recently a YouTube video I watched where a CEO in the auto industry did some "best guess" cost estimates on what Tesla was really spending to build its vehicles.
His belief was that the $35K Model 3 was probably at or near a "break even" point, IF it was built in the USA. The big differentiator would be if Tesla opted to build it in China instead, where he estimated it could then sell at $35K while still making at least a 15-20% profit margin.
I suspect that's the issue with selling a base Model 3 right now; at $35,000 - Tesla isn't making anything on the car. They probably JUST barely achieved break-even at that cost, right now, so it doesn't benefit them to sell the cars at that price EXCEPT for the hope they'll make some profit down the road, as people pay Tesla to enable the disabled features on it.
With them in kind of a cash crunch as of late, it's not that appealing to produce vehicles that only potentially make them a future $5,000 or $8,000 profit. So yeah, they'll sell it to you if you ask for it specifically -- but they don't want to really market it to people or make it easy to get one configured that way.
Lots of seat of the pants changes and decisions that quickly get pulled back, as of late. Of course, the pundits are coming out of the woodwork, declaring this indicates Tesla really is on its death-bed and about to fail, etc.
I suspect some of thing happens in other businesses all the time, but nobody notices -- because when it's a more mundane product like a can of soup or a new pair of pliers, there aren't all the eyes on it.
In any case, I think THIS change isn't a big deal. I agree that most sensible car buyers are going to opt to pay the $39,500 for this "Standard Plus" configuration of the Model 3 if they could afford the $35K for the base model. I mean, why wouldn't you when you don't even get the autopilot features Teslas are noted for if you go for the absolute cheapest one? Longer battery life and some extras like heated seats enabled too? You're going to do a lot better at resale time than you will trying to get someone to buy your used Model 3 base edition.
Where I work, we used to deploy new iPads to all new full-time employees, when they started a division that developed software apps for the platform. We wound up with a number of useless paperweights when employees turned them in upon leaving but neglected to follow our instructions to unlock them for us first.
Since then, sure -- we implemented tools to manage them ourselves with MDM, so that problem is behind us. (Heck, we stopped issuing them out anyway - because we restructured things and no longer do that app development.)
But I agree that the locked devices create a lot of senseless e-waste. No matter how simple Apple makes the process for someone to deauthorize/unlock it before before passing it on to the next person -- there are going to be a lot of situations where that step just doesn't happen.
It's frustrating that Apple (and for that matter, all the Android phones that do the same thing with Google logins) assume "Theft!" as the immediate go-to answer. I'd prefer theft to be something NOT assumed until they're told one happened. EG. Keep the current system in place BUT allow anyone to call in or email the right people to request it be unlocked for re-activation. If there's not a flag on that device's serial number saying someone already reported it stolen, do the unlock.
Pawn shops handled this, long ago, by requiring you give them your drivers' license to photocopy and keep on file whenever you pawn something. Then, if it turns out you gave them stolen merchandise, they know who to go back to. Apple, Samsung and others could do that same -- keeping your info on file as the one who requested the unlock.
I really expected Washington DC to be on that list of top cities too. The District is such a pain to drive around, most people seem to just navigate it the way I do when I'm out there; take the Metro to the nearest station and walk the rest of the way. If you need to carry around any large items/boxes though? Uber is your friend.
I see a whole lot of Uber hailing going on in DC though, thanks to all the bars and nightclubs, with people who had too much to drink, plus all the "important people" who need to get around from point A to B while not breaking a sweat or getting their nice suit dirty.
Personally, I do everything I can to avoid taking Uber and to date, I've never used Lyft (though their app is still on my phone, just in case). I think the service itself is a great idea, and I love how it disrupted the old-school and stale cab business. I just don't like paying that much to be taken relatively short distances. I spend all the money involved in owning my own vehicle and I'd prefer to use it in most situations.
I bought a couple of Alexas but I set up one of them in my office, where it's generally pretty quiet and where I'm only there a few days per week anyway. That unit is not going to hear anything but silence 99% of the time. I like it for the convenience of asking it things like how my commute home is looking, traffic-wise, or what the weather forecast is going to be for the rest of the day.
The other one is still in the box, unopened. (They had a sale where you got a pair of them for under $50 so it just seemed to make sense to do that.)
I may resell it or something.
Well .... I, for one, can't think of anything smarter than trying to supply the demand that's out there with a business. Do I think this is just insanity, trying to impose these artificial restrictions on carbon emissions? Why yes .... yes I do.
I mean, this volcano in Mexico is suddenly erupting over and over after having been dormant for the last half century or more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
That, alone, probably contributes more to emissions than all of the motor vehicles they're so concerned about. (Nobody's putting emissions control systems on volcanoes, folks!)
But humans are prone to knee-jerk reactions and illogical behavior, as well as mistakenly making big efforts at solving problems that just aren't effective. This is nothing new! If some of our world governments think the way forward is penalizing people for selling gasoline powered vehicles? Then yeah - it's GREAT that an American car maker (Tesla) was ready to sell an electric alternative that's actually a pretty nice car. I bought one myself, and that was WITHOUT getting a govt. tax credit for doing it, or because my U.S. government made the gasoline powered choices far more costly.... I just bought it because I liked the technology in it and loved the performance.
Seriously .... it's amazingly bad, how often online conversations or comments on social media devolve into utter garbage. I imagine in this instance, it was egged on because of the political topic of discussion. Furthermore? I'm fairly confident the vast majority of "white supremacist" comments were made by teenagers trying to get a rise out of people.
I mean, sure -- you really DO have these racist hate groups around. But they're generally rather disorganized or lack enough membership to do anything significant. You have FAR more people who are just angry and like to talk trash than you do people who are truly committed to promoting neo-nazis or some kind of white supremacy movement.
I mean -- even if I happily accept that a poor diet is the leading cause of premature death? They claim that low consumption of fruits is one of the major problems. One of the first things I hear from dieticians trying to solve obesity problems is to curb one's intake of fruit juices, because they contain so much natural sugar and calories.
I'm sure the fruits themselves are better for you than drinking fruit juice ... but even so? What part of a balanced diet is so contingent on eating fruit? It seems to me you could get most of the same vitamin and mineral benefits from a good selection of vegetables - not to mention all the "vitamin fortified" products out there like our cereals.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/m...
Yep! Very true!
I think a lot of kids don't realize how different a skill-set is required to write good code vs becoming a good gamer. They just really enjoy playing their favorite video games and think it would be cool to have their name on the credits as someone who actually made one of them.
Honestly, video games have become such large productions these days, I suspect they're more like creating Hollywood movies than anything else. If you're a really good artist and can draw the kinds of creatures, characters and backgrounds a game needs, you might be more employable doing that than just being a coder? Same thing for someone good at composing soundtracks for a game title, or someone good at doing voice-overs.
As many people are pointing out here? Most titles today are using off the shelf engines to handle the bulk of the grunt work, so making unique games is more about filling in that audio and visual content than coding the skeleton.
If you assume that one of the goals for raising kids is for them to become productive members of society? Then yes, such claims as a video game "damaging childrens' education" qualifies in spades as an economic drain!
There are SO many things I couldn't find on Netflix to stream... Random mentions of a 20-40 year old movie that "I gotta check out!", courtesy of a friend or co-worker, for example. But on physical DVD, they seem to have just about anything I can think of to rent.
I have a problem with that conclusion you came to at the end of all of that.
"It would be far smarter to just have better welfare systems."?
The more social welfare a government provides, the more it's going to be motivated to apply various taxes and fees to pay for it. And meanwhile, you've created a disincentive to provide as high a quality of medical care as possible. (As always happens when one is employed by the State, or contracted by the State -- there's much less fear of job loss for doing a lesser quality of work.) In the U.S. - healthcare has never *truly* been a free market proposition. There's too much regulation and even favoritism given to big pharma, for one thing. But at least the majority of doctor/patient interactions still happen within a system where a given facility is privately owned and operated, and doctors make it or don't make it based on their own merits and ability to make patients happy.
The conclusion I get from all of your statistics is that we need much less government involvement in our lives, all the way around.
Fortnite is FAR less of an economic drain for the U.K. than the continued waste of having a pointless "Royal Family" monarchy that doesn't even serve a real political purpose anymore!
But that said? I gave Fortnite a try and the game held my interest for no more than an hour or two. I know they keep downloading regular updates to it, so it's possible if I got in the mood to play again, I'd enjoy another hour or so of game-play in it? But I already paid to purchase PUBG first, when it was all the rage -- and played it a bit until I got bored with it. So Fortnite *really* just felt like another PUBG after that.
I see no reason it's any more addictive than any other online game? It just depends what an individual finds the most entertaining and compelling to play, and how much free time they have to invest in gaming. Sure, many kids or teens get hooked on video games and spend too much time on them. But the same parents who gripe about such things are often seen spending too much of their own time at casinos, gambling, or doing other things we could say are "bad for you" and should be banned. In the end, it's simply part of being human.
First off? I think wages and benefits absolutely have to be appropriate for the location of the job. With the cost of living as high as it is out in California, I would think Google would have already been paying contract workers at least $15/hr. wages or so?
But overall, I really dislike this push to make the $15/hr. wage a LEGAL mandated minimum. If a business does it voluntarily? Well, great. That's how things are supposed to work. But here in Maryland, they just pushed the $15/hr. wage law through (although it doesn't take effect immediately, and there are a few exceptions for specific work situations). And already, the feedback I've heard from small business owners is really telling. Either they're starting to look at options to move out of the state and do business elsewhere, or they're trying to find ways to hire fewer people or cutting hours to make up the difference, because they can't stay profitable while paying everyone that as a starting wage.
The problem out here is, it's already very costly and difficult to run a business. If everything else was equal, maybe the $15/hr. wage would be possible to do. But the businesses around me are only here because they had to take out big loans to get up and running, and profitability is in the FAR distant future for them. Your rank and file workers just see the money coming in and think it's unfair they don't get a bigger cut of those proceeds. What they don't see is the fact that ALL of their pay is coming from a loan the owner is trying to pay back with interest. And things like city inspectors inconsistently enforcing the laws really adds to the difficulty. (EG. We have a couple guys here who took out a $150,000 loan to open a microbrewery in what was originally an old fire house. They quickly realized that most of their customers wanted to eat while sampling the beers there, but they couldn't afford the whole process involved to cook food in the building for people. So they started inviting food trucks to come out to their property regularly. That lasted about a month, and then the city got involved, saying the food trucks weren't allowed unless it was a special festival or event. Then, they tried to renovate the whole, unused, second floor of the fire house (which was once a dance hall). They wanted to rent it out for special events like weddings or have concerts there. Well -- again, the city said no, because the new building inspector decided it needs a $100,000 fire suppression system with sprinklers installed first for safety. (The original inspector they asked about it a year earlier said it would be no problem as long as occupancy was kept under 900 people and a fire alarm was installed. He installed the fire alarm already.)
I know this is getting a little off topic, but my point is just to illustrate the kind of challenges that get put in people's way, when they're just trying to run a successful business that employs others. That's before even talking about things like employment taxes. I really believe wages are set adequately without government intervention. Nobody will accept a job if the wage is too low, and sensible employers want to hire and train people who stick around a while. But there are valid reasons someone might be only offering $10-12/hr. vs $15 ... and there are plenty of people who are really only worth the $10-12 anyway. (Our kids just turning 17 who want a first job would be examples.)
But agree with the people who say this is a garbage story. I mean, wow .... Users sync their car with their cellphone so it has a copy of their contacts and calendars, but are all surprised that data was still there if their car gets resold or wrecked and they don't erase it first? Ok ....
And yeah, a whole LOT of cars on the road today have a "black box" in them that keeps a snapshot of the last 10 seconds or so before a crash of exactly what the driver did. It may not have camera video, but info on the car's speed, steering, braking, etc. is sure stored there.
Anyone actually surprised they can look at data like a previous owner's GPS destinations is simply not even thinking. Especially with big auto auction houses, it's kind of unreasonable to demand THEY factory reset every car that comes in -- or heck, even just every Tesla that comes in. It's not their responsibility to protect someone else's data. It might even make a car worth a lot more money, if it's certifiably a celebrity of some kind who owned it last? People pay a lot for some weird things.
I recently tried to upgrade an older HP Probook 4520s that originally came with Windows 7. Windows 10 worked just fine on it when I install directly from a DVD with build 1803 on it. But the upgrade to 1809 consistently crashed it, so it would begin booting normally but hit a black screen and total system freeze before you ever got to a login prompt. I tried all the tricks, like installing the 1809 upgrade from a bootable USB stick with that Win 10 build already on it. No go.
I wound up having to tell it to postpone the 1809 upgrade for 365 days (the longest time period Windows 10 lets you specify), so the computer could keep working.
I guess it'll be great if the next build addresses the issue and lets me just skip over 1809. But I'm not sure how much they care about specific, older laptops like this one - when HP themselves dropped support for it after Windows 8?
On the original site, a comment points out how this is probably a bad deal for the creator/owner of the music, considering there's no advance paid out. With that royalty split arrangement, he stands to make a lot less profit than he would have by just cranking out music "with the click of a button" ease and putting it on streaming sites himself. Why get signed to a label at all?
This is more a publicity stunt than a lucrative deal for the artist OR for Warner Music, really (since this stuff isn't getting downloaded more than in the "hundreds of times" to maybe 1000 or so downloads, tops).
There have been plenty of computer programs that try to write their own music, with varying levels of success. But in most cases, they at least provide a "skeleton" framework of a song idea that someone can massage into a listenable, original tune. I think we're still far from the point where AI can make a song that the masses find "catchy" enough so it makes big sales numbers and becomes a true hit.