All this is doing is placing the burden of collecting those taxes on out of state taxes on the merchant instead of on the South Dakota residents as previously. This isn't imposing any new taxes on residents, merely making it impossible for them to avoid paying those taxes. If you already lived in a state where the retailer (Amazon) was incorporated or had a business presence, you were already paying sales tax and nothing will change for you.
This probably isn't too much of a burden as long as its limited to a single value for each state. If county or city level taxes start getting involved or any kind of fuckery involving different tax rates for different categories of products, then this is going to become an absolute nightmare for online retailers.
That's generally established and I think everyone knows that. The question being put forward is why the rate of people who are taking these risks is decreasing. Have people suddenly become much more risk averse? Is there some kind of economic interference that's resulting in this reduction? Is it just a small dip that happens from time to time for no real discernible reason? Are the number of startups still about the same, but what we're really seeing is a much more rapid failure in startups?
That few people start their own business is not surprising. What's interesting is that fewer people than usual are doing it.
It's not really a problem for most companies dealing with low-skill labor that previously did not receive health care. There was a provision put into place that you only needed to pay for employee's healthcare if they worked some set number of hours (in this case 30) per week. Predictably employers cut hours for many positions and there a now a large number of jobs that offer no more than 29 hours of work per week.
They probably could override the system, but if you were in their position and yourself had no idea what was going on would you override the system and let someone back onto the network? No one in middle management has a clue what's going on unless its in their direct marching orders and aren't going to stick their neck out for something like that without sending it up the chain first.
Is if a failure of automation if a serviceman receives an automated message to disconnect someone's cable because the person in charge of paying the bills forgot to do so for several months? The serviceman, customer service representative, and likely several other individuals aren't going to have detailed knowledge of every customer and their account. They just answer phones, connect/disconnect service, etc.
There's always a history of new comers becoming incumbent giants and eventually being supplanted in turn. Look at Sears which once revolutionized the way that people shopped and is now a tiny bit player this is closing down its stores. Perhaps there's some cycle in the rate of new startups within that greater cycle of corporate birth and death, but I'm willing to bet that the bigger culprit is an increasing amount of hoops that a new startup must jump through. Government is always eager to put new hoops in place, while seldom bothering to remove old ones that may not be relevant. The existing companies love this as even though it costs them additional money in order to comply with those rules, it's much harder on the little guys. Look at the recent GDPR laws in Europe as an example and ask yourself how much of a pain that would be to deal with if you're a small one or two person company. Or consider companies like Uber, Lyft, etc. that are successful precisely because they're doing their best to skirt the draconian regulations surrounding Taxi services in most cities.
I'm not sure to what extend they were really "solving" the problem. I'm guessing that a lot of what gets sent to China for recycling ends up in a landfill where it's out of sight and mind from the Western world. As China continues to industrialize and build its economy they're probably running out of cheap labor that can handle it, whether that means actually recycling it or just finding somewhere to bury or dump it.
On the other hand, we might eventually not want to recycle all of our plastic. Eventually we'll stop burning oil and other fossil fuels (as we move to solar and electric power for more and more things) and plastic is a convenient way to sequester carbon. We could even bury it in old mine shafts or find other places to store it where it won't leach into the ground water or get eaten by marine wildlife. Presumably we'll even start scrubbing it from the atmosphere, but we have to do something with it.
That's really no different than the current reality. It's probably more efficient as converting food stamps or other forms of government assistance into booze, drugs, etc. is more difficult and likely to incur transactional fees. Nothing you do or no system you implement is going to stop a dedicated deadbeat or addict.
This assumes that students will choose education that will provide a good career opportunity or that they even know what they want to do with their lives. Look upon the four year graduate rates for universities and despair. A big chunk aren't going to finish at all (though to what extent their time in university was wasted is debatable) and of those who remain a good chunk of students have no idea what they want and bounce around majors like ping pong balls and spend more than four years finishing. Even among those who do finish and close to "on time" will have a degree that's not useful for them in their careers or hasn't taught them anything useful.
Giving students unrestricted money that they can use to go to school isn't going to see all of them put that money to good use. There's no incentive on a university to ensure that the money provides self-improvement, when people will gladly spend it on entertainment or comfort.
Basically, what happens when everyone decides to go to art school? Obviously, that's unlikely to happen as there are some people you couldn't even pay to go to art school, but the point is that what happens when a sufficiently large number of people have spent all of this money on education that has no return on investment. Do you give them another sack of money and hope they make better choices that will allow them to do some productive the next time around?
I suppose you could try the central planner approach and limit the number of slots for any particular major, but how do you determine who gets the fill the limited number of slots when demand exceeds supply and what do you do when you've got loads of empty slots that you think you need filling? Worse yet, what do you do when your allocation of slots completely fails to match real world needs and you've trained thousands of people to be plumbers when everyone really only needed a few hundred?
I think the only fair way for a basic income to work is to just give it to everyone, whether they want to pursue higher education or not. There are some people who aren't ready for college yet and some who have no idea what they would want to study. Giving them money would at least allow them to get a mortgage on a house and have a chance to build some capital, learn to be an adult, and perhaps discover what they really want to do with their life. If you make the choice go to college and get "free" money or don't and get nothing, everyone will take the money even if they think they might waste it. Sure no matter what you do there's always going to be a few people that waste it completely, but you probably need a few horrible warnings around in addition to the good examples for everyone else to learn from.
That isn't to say the US isn't at fault for being behind the times. We havn't had any leadership willing or able to shake up the big telecom companies and push them out for the greater good.
I think the problem is that governments keep selling to a single bidder for the entire job and end up getting fucked time and time again, but I suppose it's always a new set of idiots in office making the same mistake so there's a little bit of an excuse.
The better idea in this case would be to identify as many companies as possible that could participate and give them each a smaller piece of the total work to be done, with some pieces of the work only being parceled out after a company has shown its ability to do a good job. The promise of future work for good performance (or the threat of no work for poor performance) will keep the companies from slacking and doing a crap job, and those who can't manage that don't get more work. Wiring fiber is something that would need to be done to the same code or standards regardless of who does it, so this isn't a case where you end up trying to integrate dozens of different solutions or smaller pieces that have little hope of fitting together.
As funny as it may sound, "socialist" Europe frequently has better market competition in many areas than the U.S. does. When companies have to compete for business, it greatly favors the consumer. Some of this can be laid at the feet of population density, as for example cellular wireless carriers aren't rushing to erect towers in bumfuck Nebraska, but it ultimately doesn't matter what allows for greater competition to exist as long as it does.
It's probably much easier to just wire everything for really good internet so no one really has need to leave their home or apartment and step over, around, or through the aforementioned obstacles. Thankfully, in a few more decades global warming should have progressed to the point where the rising ocean tides will sweep clean the streets and it will be safe to venture outside again.
You've hit the nail on the head. This is why I think Uber shouldn't have fixed rates and let riders and drivers negotiate prices for each ride. If you really want quick service to an out of the way location, offer to pay more and someone will be more than glad to take you there. If you want to attract one or two last customers before quitting for the evening, drop your rates and you'll get more takers.
Doing this would also lend Uber much more credence when it tries to claim that its drivers aren't employees.
That's just a metaphor (with a dash of hyperbole), much like claiming that your phone is bricked. The real question is whether it's "soft dead" or "hard dead" and whether or not it would have allowed you to say something "soft smart" or "hard smart". I'm not sure what that might mean, but I think it illustrates the uselessness of those types of phrases.
How does that help with diversity at all. If everyone claims to be a black lesbian midget in the metadata then it becomes useless. It's the same kind of SEO crap that's been plaguing the web. If you're using content-based keywords, I fail to see how that does anything for diversity either unless you believe that there are some things that men won't talk about or that white people don't discuss. But even if you do believe that, it doesn't mean that pushing more of that content means that anyone actually wants to consume it.
Why even call it "bricked" in that case. If you need to add a qualifier to a binary classifier, you're just creating a useless term. If the software is hosed and needs to be reinstalled or reconfigured, just say so. It would be like using "____ dead" to describe some type of situation where something could be expected to return to life. It's not really dead, so why try to describe it as such unless you're trying to make something sound much more scary than it truly is.
It would be interesting to see how an AI does this. I suppose that you could perform an analysis on the voice to determine sex and where a person is generally from. Certain dialects are much more likely to be found in specific ethnic groups, so you could probably infer race as well. Wouldn't such a system naturally drive people to culturally appropriate ethnic mannerisms (worse yet, it would probably mean that overexaggerating unique aspects of a dialect yields a better score) in order improve their rankings though? Is Google encouraging cultural appropriation? The shame!
Realistically if Google makes it more difficult for users to find what they want, people will just go elsewhere. If I want a steak and someone keeps trying to sell me a veggie burger, I'm eventually just going to go eat elsewhere.
To Google (or the subset of the company in charge of this) those words are synonymous. They apparently seem to believe that the color of a person's skin is more important than the content their podcast.
I doubt this will have much of an effect in the grand scheme of things. You can't sell a product that no one in the market wants to buy. If there were more demand for the things that Google were trying to push, people would naturally move to fill in that demand and Google would need to do very little beyond making sure that they weren't damaging the market through their own actions. At most they might identify and help to address a supply side issue, but that assumes that one must exist to be solved.
I also think that most of these efforts are halfhearted at best anyways as it isn't really about solving problems, but having the appearance of doing so in order to appear virtuous. It's essentially just another mega-church that neither feeds nor clothes the homeless. Perpetual failure to remove the problem simply means you can continue to proselytize about it ad infinitum.
But that isn't how debates ought to take place. Debates should start with premises and mutually agreed facts and then reach conclusions via reason and logic.
You can't run politics that way. That outcome means that someone has to indicate that they were wrong, mistaken, or incorrect in some belief of theirs. Once you start pulling on that thread and admit that your ideology may have been flawed in some way, you might have to question the rest of it as well and that's butting heads with your own deeply held beliefs. It's the same reason that there are a lot of religious people who would cling to young earth creationism even if god descended from heaven and told them it didn't happen that way. If they give ground there, what patch might erode from beneath them next?
For most people, political beliefs are every bit as much of an article of faith as religious beliefs, even if a person isn't religious. You can argue that it's a type of cognitive trap that humans are prone to, but I suspect that the kinds of problems that politics tends to deal with are those where there isn't very good science or its just incredibly difficult to apply the scientific method. Sociology, economics, etc. are all quite shaky compared to physics, mathematics, etc. and it's difficult to do population wide empirical studies in a controlled manner so we try to operate from theory more than anything. I'd be all for someone making communist island and laissez faire island and seeing what happens over the course of several decades, but the logistics of doing it make it practically impossible.
The problem arises when idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H users install some trojan and then expect Apple to fix it and then bad mouth the company when they refuse to deal with it or for having bad security. The problem with a design approach that dumbs things down as much as possible so that any fool can use it is that any fool will use it.
Also, I believe you always could side-load if you wanted by compiling the app yourself with XCode and loading it on the device, or at least you used to be able to do so. I can't remember if Apple started charing some yearly fee to app developers that made this unfeasible even for most tech geeks, but this is about the appropriate number of hoops to keep the kinds of users that would do something utterly stupid from hurting themselves.
Wouldn't it be funny if some years later this played out similarly to the Yahoo/Alibaba deal? Google would become a useless husk that's being sold off to a mobile carrier for brand name and parts while their stake in a Chinese company is where the majority of the value is at.
I don't really see that happening as I haven't seen anything that would be a technological challenger to Google on a wide scale, but one never knows how the landscape will have changed in a decade.
I'll totally believe that YouTube has an agenda that is pushes, but I really need to see some proof of what you're claiming. YouTube has all manner of videos containing people discussing, showing, and actively using all manner of firearms and ammunition so I'm skeptical that a video would be deleted merely for having a gun store in the background of a video.
The short answer is that yes, they are correlated. Are they a perfect measure of success, of course not. It's pretty easy to come of with a plausible example of a person with a high score that has been driven by their parents all their life coming unraveled in college because they never learned to function for themselves, or an instance where someone did poorly in school in their youth or teens due to a terrible home situation that begins to excel once they're in college and removed from that environment.
If you wanted to show that these tests were useless you'd want to show that any of their predictive ability can also be captured by some other measurement (e.g. high school grade, ASVAB, midichlorian count, etc.) that does could be used as a prediction for success. However, as it's unlikely for any one thing to be a perfect predictor, using these tests is probably useful. There was even one study that found the ACT/SAT to still posses predictive ability after controlling for general intelligence measurement aspects of the test. The study is paywalled so I can't read it to determine if it's actually any good, but that's what's being claimed.
If you have a test that's supposed to measure educational attainment and it does a reasonably good job of that (which you could check based on comparisons with high school GPA) and you find it isn't correlating well to college outcomes, you might want to check what the hell it is you're teaching in college. If there's no difference in outcome between people at the very top of the SAT and those at the very bottom for a course, I'd question if it has any educational value. We could probably come up with an easy example where we have a course the assign's grade based on height. It's possible that there may be a correlation (suppose people with better nutrition are on average taller and smarter as a result of physical development, which makes sense) between test score and height, but it's unlikely. We can see that ACT/SAT would have no predictive ability for success, but that doesn't mean those tests are useless, just that the course is worthless in terms of education content.
Of course you don't want to use these tests as the only factor either. I've known plenty of people with what could be described as some type of test anxiety who are incredibly brilliant, but buckle under pressure or when put on the spot. In and ideal world, we'd identify those students and help correct this problem early in life, but we're clearly not there yet. So while we shouldn't use these tests of tests as the sole criteria for college admission, it's completely false to say that they have no ability to measure educational outcome. Maybe if you're handing out degrees in underwater basket weaving, then having a good ACT/SAT score does fuck all for students, but you're probably not going to find a lot of doctors, engineers, programmers, etc. that have scores in the bottom quartile for those tests.
I suspect that this will probably work out about as well as the AOL / Time Warner merger back around 2000. A lot of hullabaloo in the press and middle management from both sides sabotaging the supposed "synergistic experience" that the merger is designed to create over fear of becoming redundant as a result. You'll have executives who might know a fair bit about one field trying to make business decisions in another where they're no more knowledgeable than the average person off the street, and the results are all too predictable.
That kind of reductionism is rather inane. Henry Ford didn't flip a switch one day and churn out the ~1 billion vehicles that the world is currently using that are creating a good deal of all of this pollution we're now dealing with. Could you honestly look back and say that what he and others like him did has had no impact on the world today just because what they did at the time was rather small in comparison?
On October 16, 1919 a silly little man gave his first speech to a little over 100 other people at a restaurant in Munich, Germany. No meaningful impact would come about from that. The major political parties like the SPD or Zentrum would be the ones to lead Germany. Not any tiny fringe political operation.
I think the issue has to do more with shared or diffused responsibility in groups. The larger the group, the less likely anyone is to get in trouble for it because it's more difficult to attribute the harm to any one person's action. It's the same in large religions or political groups when there's some kind of scandal. At best you might get one or two people thrown under the bus, but you're not even guaranteed that much.
Should you automatically put the CEO in jail if they weren't responsible and had no part in the wrong doing? What if they were the person who noticed something was wrong and blew the whistle on the wrong doing?
What about the more morally gray cases where the upper management is pushing hard for results and some of the underlings interpret these directives is creative, yet illegal or unethical ways? We can establish that the CEO might have ultimately caused the behavior, but they never asked for something illegal.
We could further descend the ladder until we get the bottom rung where the CEO has a signed letter in blood telling everyone to kill and rape babies to increase profits where it's pretty clear that they need to go away for a long while. However, the point is that where in there is the line where you know exactly which people need to go to jail and which people don't?
With an individual crime it's a lot easier for a jury to wrap their head around what happened and there are far fewer conflicting versions of events. Try to put a group on trial, and no one really knows who to trust when all of the fingers start getting pointed and there's always enough plausible deniability or presumption of innocence that it's a lot harder to get a jury to convict. Also, a large organization is going to have a lot of money to spend on lawyers. Much like a celebrity, they can afford the best legal talent so you're more likely to get away with murder, figuratively and likely literally as well.
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You mean to tell me that the residents of South Dakota didn't self-report and pay the state use tax as they are obligated to do?
All this is doing is placing the burden of collecting those taxes on out of state taxes on the merchant instead of on the South Dakota residents as previously. This isn't imposing any new taxes on residents, merely making it impossible for them to avoid paying those taxes. If you already lived in a state where the retailer (Amazon) was incorporated or had a business presence, you were already paying sales tax and nothing will change for you.
This probably isn't too much of a burden as long as its limited to a single value for each state. If county or city level taxes start getting involved or any kind of fuckery involving different tax rates for different categories of products, then this is going to become an absolute nightmare for online retailers.
That's generally established and I think everyone knows that. The question being put forward is why the rate of people who are taking these risks is decreasing. Have people suddenly become much more risk averse? Is there some kind of economic interference that's resulting in this reduction? Is it just a small dip that happens from time to time for no real discernible reason? Are the number of startups still about the same, but what we're really seeing is a much more rapid failure in startups?
That few people start their own business is not surprising. What's interesting is that fewer people than usual are doing it.
It's not really a problem for most companies dealing with low-skill labor that previously did not receive health care. There was a provision put into place that you only needed to pay for employee's healthcare if they worked some set number of hours (in this case 30) per week. Predictably employers cut hours for many positions and there a now a large number of jobs that offer no more than 29 hours of work per week.
They probably could override the system, but if you were in their position and yourself had no idea what was going on would you override the system and let someone back onto the network? No one in middle management has a clue what's going on unless its in their direct marching orders and aren't going to stick their neck out for something like that without sending it up the chain first.
Is if a failure of automation if a serviceman receives an automated message to disconnect someone's cable because the person in charge of paying the bills forgot to do so for several months? The serviceman, customer service representative, and likely several other individuals aren't going to have detailed knowledge of every customer and their account. They just answer phones, connect/disconnect service, etc.
There's always a history of new comers becoming incumbent giants and eventually being supplanted in turn. Look at Sears which once revolutionized the way that people shopped and is now a tiny bit player this is closing down its stores. Perhaps there's some cycle in the rate of new startups within that greater cycle of corporate birth and death, but I'm willing to bet that the bigger culprit is an increasing amount of hoops that a new startup must jump through. Government is always eager to put new hoops in place, while seldom bothering to remove old ones that may not be relevant. The existing companies love this as even though it costs them additional money in order to comply with those rules, it's much harder on the little guys. Look at the recent GDPR laws in Europe as an example and ask yourself how much of a pain that would be to deal with if you're a small one or two person company. Or consider companies like Uber, Lyft, etc. that are successful precisely because they're doing their best to skirt the draconian regulations surrounding Taxi services in most cities.
I'm not sure to what extend they were really "solving" the problem. I'm guessing that a lot of what gets sent to China for recycling ends up in a landfill where it's out of sight and mind from the Western world. As China continues to industrialize and build its economy they're probably running out of cheap labor that can handle it, whether that means actually recycling it or just finding somewhere to bury or dump it.
On the other hand, we might eventually not want to recycle all of our plastic. Eventually we'll stop burning oil and other fossil fuels (as we move to solar and electric power for more and more things) and plastic is a convenient way to sequester carbon. We could even bury it in old mine shafts or find other places to store it where it won't leach into the ground water or get eaten by marine wildlife. Presumably we'll even start scrubbing it from the atmosphere, but we have to do something with it.
That's really no different than the current reality. It's probably more efficient as converting food stamps or other forms of government assistance into booze, drugs, etc. is more difficult and likely to incur transactional fees. Nothing you do or no system you implement is going to stop a dedicated deadbeat or addict.
This assumes that students will choose education that will provide a good career opportunity or that they even know what they want to do with their lives. Look upon the four year graduate rates for universities and despair. A big chunk aren't going to finish at all (though to what extent their time in university was wasted is debatable) and of those who remain a good chunk of students have no idea what they want and bounce around majors like ping pong balls and spend more than four years finishing. Even among those who do finish and close to "on time" will have a degree that's not useful for them in their careers or hasn't taught them anything useful.
Giving students unrestricted money that they can use to go to school isn't going to see all of them put that money to good use. There's no incentive on a university to ensure that the money provides self-improvement, when people will gladly spend it on entertainment or comfort.
Basically, what happens when everyone decides to go to art school? Obviously, that's unlikely to happen as there are some people you couldn't even pay to go to art school, but the point is that what happens when a sufficiently large number of people have spent all of this money on education that has no return on investment. Do you give them another sack of money and hope they make better choices that will allow them to do some productive the next time around?
I suppose you could try the central planner approach and limit the number of slots for any particular major, but how do you determine who gets the fill the limited number of slots when demand exceeds supply and what do you do when you've got loads of empty slots that you think you need filling? Worse yet, what do you do when your allocation of slots completely fails to match real world needs and you've trained thousands of people to be plumbers when everyone really only needed a few hundred?
I think the only fair way for a basic income to work is to just give it to everyone, whether they want to pursue higher education or not. There are some people who aren't ready for college yet and some who have no idea what they would want to study. Giving them money would at least allow them to get a mortgage on a house and have a chance to build some capital, learn to be an adult, and perhaps discover what they really want to do with their life. If you make the choice go to college and get "free" money or don't and get nothing, everyone will take the money even if they think they might waste it. Sure no matter what you do there's always going to be a few people that waste it completely, but you probably need a few horrible warnings around in addition to the good examples for everyone else to learn from.
That isn't to say the US isn't at fault for being behind the times. We havn't had any leadership willing or able to shake up the big telecom companies and push them out for the greater good.
I think the problem is that governments keep selling to a single bidder for the entire job and end up getting fucked time and time again, but I suppose it's always a new set of idiots in office making the same mistake so there's a little bit of an excuse.
The better idea in this case would be to identify as many companies as possible that could participate and give them each a smaller piece of the total work to be done, with some pieces of the work only being parceled out after a company has shown its ability to do a good job. The promise of future work for good performance (or the threat of no work for poor performance) will keep the companies from slacking and doing a crap job, and those who can't manage that don't get more work. Wiring fiber is something that would need to be done to the same code or standards regardless of who does it, so this isn't a case where you end up trying to integrate dozens of different solutions or smaller pieces that have little hope of fitting together.
As funny as it may sound, "socialist" Europe frequently has better market competition in many areas than the U.S. does. When companies have to compete for business, it greatly favors the consumer. Some of this can be laid at the feet of population density, as for example cellular wireless carriers aren't rushing to erect towers in bumfuck Nebraska, but it ultimately doesn't matter what allows for greater competition to exist as long as it does.
It's probably much easier to just wire everything for really good internet so no one really has need to leave their home or apartment and step over, around, or through the aforementioned obstacles. Thankfully, in a few more decades global warming should have progressed to the point where the rising ocean tides will sweep clean the streets and it will be safe to venture outside again.
You've hit the nail on the head. This is why I think Uber shouldn't have fixed rates and let riders and drivers negotiate prices for each ride. If you really want quick service to an out of the way location, offer to pay more and someone will be more than glad to take you there. If you want to attract one or two last customers before quitting for the evening, drop your rates and you'll get more takers.
Doing this would also lend Uber much more credence when it tries to claim that its drivers aren't employees.
That's just a metaphor (with a dash of hyperbole), much like claiming that your phone is bricked. The real question is whether it's "soft dead" or "hard dead" and whether or not it would have allowed you to say something "soft smart" or "hard smart". I'm not sure what that might mean, but I think it illustrates the uselessness of those types of phrases.
That would work right up until we need to stop the cooling. Might want to start building a train while working on the first project.
How does that help with diversity at all. If everyone claims to be a black lesbian midget in the metadata then it becomes useless. It's the same kind of SEO crap that's been plaguing the web. If you're using content-based keywords, I fail to see how that does anything for diversity either unless you believe that there are some things that men won't talk about or that white people don't discuss. But even if you do believe that, it doesn't mean that pushing more of that content means that anyone actually wants to consume it.
Why even call it "bricked" in that case. If you need to add a qualifier to a binary classifier, you're just creating a useless term. If the software is hosed and needs to be reinstalled or reconfigured, just say so. It would be like using "____ dead" to describe some type of situation where something could be expected to return to life. It's not really dead, so why try to describe it as such unless you're trying to make something sound much more scary than it truly is.
It would be interesting to see how an AI does this. I suppose that you could perform an analysis on the voice to determine sex and where a person is generally from. Certain dialects are much more likely to be found in specific ethnic groups, so you could probably infer race as well. Wouldn't such a system naturally drive people to culturally appropriate ethnic mannerisms (worse yet, it would probably mean that overexaggerating unique aspects of a dialect yields a better score) in order improve their rankings though? Is Google encouraging cultural appropriation? The shame!
Realistically if Google makes it more difficult for users to find what they want, people will just go elsewhere. If I want a steak and someone keeps trying to sell me a veggie burger, I'm eventually just going to go eat elsewhere.
To Google (or the subset of the company in charge of this) those words are synonymous. They apparently seem to believe that the color of a person's skin is more important than the content their podcast.
I doubt this will have much of an effect in the grand scheme of things. You can't sell a product that no one in the market wants to buy. If there were more demand for the things that Google were trying to push, people would naturally move to fill in that demand and Google would need to do very little beyond making sure that they weren't damaging the market through their own actions. At most they might identify and help to address a supply side issue, but that assumes that one must exist to be solved.
I also think that most of these efforts are halfhearted at best anyways as it isn't really about solving problems, but having the appearance of doing so in order to appear virtuous. It's essentially just another mega-church that neither feeds nor clothes the homeless. Perpetual failure to remove the problem simply means you can continue to proselytize about it ad infinitum.
But that isn't how debates ought to take place. Debates should start with premises and mutually agreed facts and then reach conclusions via reason and logic.
You can't run politics that way. That outcome means that someone has to indicate that they were wrong, mistaken, or incorrect in some belief of theirs. Once you start pulling on that thread and admit that your ideology may have been flawed in some way, you might have to question the rest of it as well and that's butting heads with your own deeply held beliefs. It's the same reason that there are a lot of religious people who would cling to young earth creationism even if god descended from heaven and told them it didn't happen that way. If they give ground there, what patch might erode from beneath them next?
For most people, political beliefs are every bit as much of an article of faith as religious beliefs, even if a person isn't religious. You can argue that it's a type of cognitive trap that humans are prone to, but I suspect that the kinds of problems that politics tends to deal with are those where there isn't very good science or its just incredibly difficult to apply the scientific method. Sociology, economics, etc. are all quite shaky compared to physics, mathematics, etc. and it's difficult to do population wide empirical studies in a controlled manner so we try to operate from theory more than anything. I'd be all for someone making communist island and laissez faire island and seeing what happens over the course of several decades, but the logistics of doing it make it practically impossible.
The problem arises when idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H users install some trojan and then expect Apple to fix it and then bad mouth the company when they refuse to deal with it or for having bad security. The problem with a design approach that dumbs things down as much as possible so that any fool can use it is that any fool will use it.
Also, I believe you always could side-load if you wanted by compiling the app yourself with XCode and loading it on the device, or at least you used to be able to do so. I can't remember if Apple started charing some yearly fee to app developers that made this unfeasible even for most tech geeks, but this is about the appropriate number of hoops to keep the kinds of users that would do something utterly stupid from hurting themselves.
Wouldn't it be funny if some years later this played out similarly to the Yahoo/Alibaba deal? Google would become a useless husk that's being sold off to a mobile carrier for brand name and parts while their stake in a Chinese company is where the majority of the value is at.
I don't really see that happening as I haven't seen anything that would be a technological challenger to Google on a wide scale, but one never knows how the landscape will have changed in a decade.
I'll totally believe that YouTube has an agenda that is pushes, but I really need to see some proof of what you're claiming. YouTube has all manner of videos containing people discussing, showing, and actively using all manner of firearms and ammunition so I'm skeptical that a video would be deleted merely for having a gun store in the background of a video.
There's no evidence such tests aid in education.
I was rather skeptical of this claim (typically, though not always, something isn't done for no reason at all) so I did some quick Google searches.
I don't believe your claim is true from the following: https://www.applerouth.com/blog/2013/03/11/do-higher-satact-scores-indicate-college-readiness/, https://www.lbs.co.il/data/attachment-files/2016/10/34716_Kwon_Jamie.pdf, and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090148/ which showed among the top results when searching for whether or not these tests were correlated with college GPA.
The short answer is that yes, they are correlated. Are they a perfect measure of success, of course not. It's pretty easy to come of with a plausible example of a person with a high score that has been driven by their parents all their life coming unraveled in college because they never learned to function for themselves, or an instance where someone did poorly in school in their youth or teens due to a terrible home situation that begins to excel once they're in college and removed from that environment.
If you wanted to show that these tests were useless you'd want to show that any of their predictive ability can also be captured by some other measurement (e.g. high school grade, ASVAB, midichlorian count, etc.) that does could be used as a prediction for success. However, as it's unlikely for any one thing to be a perfect predictor, using these tests is probably useful. There was even one study that found the ACT/SAT to still posses predictive ability after controlling for general intelligence measurement aspects of the test. The study is paywalled so I can't read it to determine if it's actually any good, but that's what's being claimed.
If you have a test that's supposed to measure educational attainment and it does a reasonably good job of that (which you could check based on comparisons with high school GPA) and you find it isn't correlating well to college outcomes, you might want to check what the hell it is you're teaching in college. If there's no difference in outcome between people at the very top of the SAT and those at the very bottom for a course, I'd question if it has any educational value. We could probably come up with an easy example where we have a course the assign's grade based on height. It's possible that there may be a correlation (suppose people with better nutrition are on average taller and smarter as a result of physical development, which makes sense) between test score and height, but it's unlikely. We can see that ACT/SAT would have no predictive ability for success, but that doesn't mean those tests are useless, just that the course is worthless in terms of education content.
Of course you don't want to use these tests as the only factor either. I've known plenty of people with what could be described as some type of test anxiety who are incredibly brilliant, but buckle under pressure or when put on the spot. In and ideal world, we'd identify those students and help correct this problem early in life, but we're clearly not there yet. So while we shouldn't use these tests of tests as the sole criteria for college admission, it's completely false to say that they have no ability to measure educational outcome. Maybe if you're handing out degrees in underwater basket weaving, then having a good ACT/SAT score does fuck all for students, but you're probably not going to find a lot of doctors, engineers, programmers, etc. that have scores in the bottom quartile for those tests.
I suspect that this will probably work out about as well as the AOL / Time Warner merger back around 2000. A lot of hullabaloo in the press and middle management from both sides sabotaging the supposed "synergistic experience" that the merger is designed to create over fear of becoming redundant as a result. You'll have executives who might know a fair bit about one field trying to make business decisions in another where they're no more knowledgeable than the average person off the street, and the results are all too predictable.
That kind of reductionism is rather inane. Henry Ford didn't flip a switch one day and churn out the ~1 billion vehicles that the world is currently using that are creating a good deal of all of this pollution we're now dealing with. Could you honestly look back and say that what he and others like him did has had no impact on the world today just because what they did at the time was rather small in comparison?
On October 16, 1919 a silly little man gave his first speech to a little over 100 other people at a restaurant in Munich, Germany. No meaningful impact would come about from that. The major political parties like the SPD or Zentrum would be the ones to lead Germany. Not any tiny fringe political operation.
I think the issue has to do more with shared or diffused responsibility in groups. The larger the group, the less likely anyone is to get in trouble for it because it's more difficult to attribute the harm to any one person's action. It's the same in large religions or political groups when there's some kind of scandal. At best you might get one or two people thrown under the bus, but you're not even guaranteed that much.
Should you automatically put the CEO in jail if they weren't responsible and had no part in the wrong doing? What if they were the person who noticed something was wrong and blew the whistle on the wrong doing?
What about the more morally gray cases where the upper management is pushing hard for results and some of the underlings interpret these directives is creative, yet illegal or unethical ways? We can establish that the CEO might have ultimately caused the behavior, but they never asked for something illegal.
We could further descend the ladder until we get the bottom rung where the CEO has a signed letter in blood telling everyone to kill and rape babies to increase profits where it's pretty clear that they need to go away for a long while. However, the point is that where in there is the line where you know exactly which people need to go to jail and which people don't?
With an individual crime it's a lot easier for a jury to wrap their head around what happened and there are far fewer conflicting versions of events. Try to put a group on trial, and no one really knows who to trust when all of the fingers start getting pointed and there's always enough plausible deniability or presumption of innocence that it's a lot harder to get a jury to convict. Also, a large organization is going to have a lot of money to spend on lawyers. Much like a celebrity, they can afford the best legal talent so you're more likely to get away with murder, figuratively and likely literally as well.