I wonder if the better solution in that case would be to have a drone do the delivery to the balcony. That would be a lot more efficient in general because the delivery person has to wait for the damned elevator instead of you.
A good chunk of the delivery charge goes to paying the delivery person. With a lot of goods becoming less and less expensive, a bigger part of the cost equation is the person selling them or facilitating the service. It's why all you can eat buffets will let people eat massive quantities of food for lower prices than many meals cost. Individual food ordering, preparation, and service uses up far more human labor that doesn't exist when making certain dishes in bulk and having customers self-serve.
Also, Dominoes won't switch to robots if they cost more because consumers won't pay more money just for the novelty of getting a pizza delivered by robot. Similarly, Dominoes can't afford to bilk customers too much with high deliver charges because there are plenty of other pizza businesses that are going to use it as an opportunity to undercut Dominoes and get more business for themselves.
Or they just open their app for the other company that they drive with and use that instead. This isn't really going to stop anyone who doesn't want to quit.
How big of an issue is this anyways? I would imagine that most drivers aren't pulling 10 hour shifts to start with, though there may be a few that have nothing better to do.
It's laptops and desktop computers. What's left to "innovate" outside of some radically new technology that makes one of the individual components better?
I wish Apple would quit trying to come out with new stuff all the time and get the bugs and quirks in their products ironed out. Take two years and don't release any wildly new hardware or software features and just refine the hell out of what's out there now.
They're probably in for an ugly time of things. The people in power manage to stay in power because they can afford to pay for their own protection and to placate the population with all of that money. Add in those societies being among the more repressive on the planet and you've got a powder keg that's ready to erupt. The only question is how violent it will become and whether or not it will devolve into outright civil war as we've recently seen with other countries in the region.
Free market absolutists would be quick to point out that when the government grants companies legal monopolies and competition is barred from competing, you don't have much of a free market. Government would have far fewer problems to solve if it weren't creating so many of them to begin with. When you don't have to worry about outside competition taking your business, is it any wonder that a company can devote maximum effort to rent seeking behavior like this?
Government granted monopolies is about the biggest possible way to interfere with a free market outside of making the sale and purchase of something illegal.
Also, if a city wants to set up their own local service to compete I don't see any problems with it as long as they don't bar anyone else from business or give themselves the same kind of monopolistic advantages that were being sold to individual cable companies. Also, these measures typically come about as a result of ballot measures by that city rather than as a result of concentrated government power (I don't recall everyone in town voting to give Comcast a monopoly) so it's far more democratic as well.
Equating municipal broadband services with wealth redistribution schemes is missing the mark by quite a bit. Also, having the government punish companies that benefited from the government's bad actions well after the fact is stupid and will only lead to prolonged court battles that the government won't win. Quit worrying about trying to make everything even and fair and just get rid of the rules that keep perpetuating a shitty situation.
Not to defend Kaspersky, but this seems to be the trend with most security (or perhaps it's even more general than that) software. A new product comes out that's free of cruft, relatively easy to use, and works effectively. Eventually it turns to shit and it becomes as bloated and craptastic as the other software that it replaced some years ago. Fortunately, there's a new product that has just come out . . .
I think the bigger problem is that flying as an experience kind of sucks in general (not all of this is the fault of the airlines) and big planes are mostly good for a hub-based model where you might need some additional connecting flights with the possibility for long layovers in between. Mid-sized planes have much greater range now and unless you're making some truly long haul international flights, it's not a major obstacle to have direct flights between the smaller airports that these hubs used to connect. A lot of budget airlines have sprung up to do exactly that and the narrow focus on a few routes lets them keep costs down which is as big of a factor as anything else.
I think it just goes to show that simplistic ideas of good and evil are useless as soon as they come into contact with the real world.
If China is so evil would it be good for us to overthrow them and liberate its people, or is that too an evil act? If this makes life better for the average person in China, then it's pointless to spend much time worrying over whether or not Google makes an extra buck or where this action rates on some kind of morality scale that the people who like to chide Google for failing to follow couldn't stick to either even if they tried. Part or probably most of the devices people use to access the internet come from China, so none of us are clearly above doing business with China either.
My point is that society as a whole doesn't really care, not that there isn't some individual person out there that isn't trying to solve the problem. You should be able to figure out that in plain language saying "no one" doesn't imply a universal quantifier across the entire population. Individual teachers probably care (until they get burned out) but they can do fuck all and probably have their hands tied by the system as much as anything. The same goes for other groups and individuals as well, who lack the political or financial capital to do anything on a large scale.
The point is that Republicans don't really care because they're largely not based in the inner cities so from their perspective it's someone else's problem and they're not all that keen about being made to pay for it either. The Democrats don't really care either because to the extent that people in the inner city vote, they're sure as fuck not going to vote Republican so there's no incentive to do anything for that small part of their base when lip service does fine.
Any small groups or individuals trying out different systems (whether they work or not) don't have the political power to accomplish anything themselves, especially not against any intrenched interests and the larger political parties are mostly apathetic towards that overall cause for reasons stated above. Even if those new systems do get better results, they're probably not so much better to the point that it becomes blindingly obvious that it's a better way. I'll admit that I haven't read much of any research on the topic though so if there are a large number of good studies showing that charter schools do a better job, I'm more than open to reading through them.
Excess power isn't a huge problem as there's almost always something that can be done with it that may only be financially reasonable to do when there's a surplus or costs are low. One easy example is to pump water uphill into a reservoir that can be used to generate power through hydro-electric when there's a sudden spike in demand. Sure it would be more efficient to use a gigantic battery to store all of it, but those aren't necessarily cheaper and some cities may have the kind of geography that makes a setup like that easier to implement.
I'm sure there's plenty of cryptocurrency yahoos that would gladly load up trucks full of GPUs to drive them to wherever power is cheap due to excess.
It's okay in a lot of areas, it's just that no one really gives a shit about the inner city school districts and so they've gone to absolute shit. If you remove that from the equation, the U.S. as a whole is quite comparable to other western democracies. The U.S. has seems more content to let this problem fester and to deal with the consequences rather than tackle it head on so the problem just goes from bad to worse in a lot of ways.
On a side note, if there weren't so many useless (not as in they suck at their jobs, just useless in that their jobs don't improve educational outcomes in any measurable way) administrators soaking up money, we could pay teachers a hell of a lot more. The U.S. spends more on education as a percentage of GDP than other countries that do as well or better than us, and over time our spending on education as a percentage of GDP has increased. Even though you hear about cutbacks all the time (who pays attention when funding is increased?) the trend has been moving upward over time. So it's not strictly a money problem.
Here's a good report (PDF warning) that has looked into how public education has changed in the U.S. over time. The increase in administrative staff has done nothing to improve outcomes and removing the excess would allow for an additional ~$11,000 in yearly salary for every teacher.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
If they do nothing instead of spending their time committing crime it might well be worth it. If my options are to pay people to stay at home or to pay police, prison guards, and and much larger legal system I'd prefer to avoid creating bigger government for no real benefit.
Also, we're already paying loads of taxes to fund various welfare programs. You could have a reasonably sized UBI by getting rid of the various different programs and putting everything towards a UBI instead. That also has the added benefit of greatly simplifying the system and making another huge chunk of government bureaucracy redundant.
No system is going to be perfect, and there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system or who add no value to society, but they exist independent of the system. However, that shouldn't stop us from making pragmatic choices when possible.
The Gawker name might be dead, but you're a fool if you think they already haven't been replaced by a different outfit of the same style under a new name. You can say that when it comes down to it, not many people are actually willing to put down their own money to pay for Gawker, but there are loads who are willing to give it their attention and Gawker made plenty of money from showing ads to that captive audience over the years.
This is a failure of one particular entity. I suspect that total viewership for yellow journalism as a whole hasn't budged a bit, and as long as there is consumer demand for something, other people are going to strive to fulfill that demand.
If states wanted to effectively ensure that Net Neutrality existed they could ban cities from offering monopoly rights to ISPs. I suspect that if providers were to actually have to compete for customers based on their service, you'd quickly see that companies which try to throttle certain types of traffic would be avoided by consumers.
You can't have a system that allows a private business to effectively function like a utility without requiring it to also behave like a utility. Since it does not appear easy to make these businesses behave like utilities, then it does not make sense to give them any kind of monopoly rights for the infrastructure.
A fully blown automated vehicle that's going cross on cross-country trips from arbitrary start and end points? Probably not.
However, if you told me that some city had some kind of automated mini-cabs that could ferry people around certain parts of downtown or other restricted areas, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.
It's actually a future hedge against a robot apocalypse. We want the machines to see that people are nice and courteous, because they're also going to watch videos like this. That poor bastard is going to be first against the wall.
While what you say is true; this only makes Cape Town look like architects of their own peril. They could have started building desalination plants, or working on viable alternatives long ago before it was crunch time.
To some degree this is true of just about everything and everyone though. There's all manner of things you or I could and probably should be doing today to make a better future for ourselves by anticipating problems we're likely to face and taking steps to solve them now and to some degree we likely do things like this such as investing for retirement, etc. The problem is that this particular problem is outside of the scope of any one individual.
You can blame it on governments (and by extension the people who elected them) but they're notoriously short-sighted as well and it's pretty difficult to run on and win with a platform about addressing things that may be twenty years down the road instead of the current set of problems people are facing, probably due largely to short-sighted thinking in the past. But that's just the nature of the beast. Most people don't care about identifying and mitigating problems far down the road, so the governments they elect really don't either unless they've run out of pressing current issues.
I think the biggest reason for any Apple presence being felt at CES at any time was because they held their own conference during the same week but at a different venue. They've since stopped having that yearly conference and instead just hold their product events when they have some product to announce, which doesn't really sync up with CES any more.
Most of the Caribbean islands have much smaller populations, around 100,000 or less and the islands with millions of people tend to have several lakes and rivers. It's a lot easier to deal with smaller populations, especially when that infrastructure has already been built and adjusted to meet the needs of population over time. Setting up new desalination plants to support millions of people is a logistical nightmare even if you have a highly competent team tackling the problem.
Yup. Most people just want to do their work and then go home and get on with their lives. The majority of people tend to keep their heads down and avoid stuff like this which is both why we don't hear about it very often and also part of the reason that things like this can fester for so long.
I don't think it's possible to maybe even healthy to try to stifle any conversation that isn't work related. There's always going to be political talk around water coolers or over beers at lunch, but when people start trying to effect company policy or process with their own personal projects, it tends to piss off at least one other person who doesn't care for whatever is being pushed. It's the same with more banal stuff like people evangelizing some new programming language or other piece of technology instead of anything political. The rest of the team doesn't want to switch to a new language or framework just because someone did a small side project in it and thinks its cool.
Yeah, the summary seems designed to bait people, but at least this story has some connection to technology unlike a lot of political crap that gets thrown up here some days. It would probably be better to leave the aspects unrelated to the technology side of it out, or it just stirs up shit in the comments. Or just more shit than usual I suppose.
I think you should avoid eye contact with gorillas as they may view it as a form of aggression. There was an incident at a Dutch zoo several years ago where a Gorilla escaped its exhibit and attacked a women who was constantly visiting the zoo and making eye contact and smiling at the Gorilla (why they didn't kick her out or ban her I don't know) which was making it absolutely pissed.
Regardless of how much or little they're like us, or the amount of intelligence they posses, they are ridiculously strong and can treat an adult human like a rag doll.
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I wonder if the better solution in that case would be to have a drone do the delivery to the balcony. That would be a lot more efficient in general because the delivery person has to wait for the damned elevator instead of you.
A good chunk of the delivery charge goes to paying the delivery person. With a lot of goods becoming less and less expensive, a bigger part of the cost equation is the person selling them or facilitating the service. It's why all you can eat buffets will let people eat massive quantities of food for lower prices than many meals cost. Individual food ordering, preparation, and service uses up far more human labor that doesn't exist when making certain dishes in bulk and having customers self-serve.
Also, Dominoes won't switch to robots if they cost more because consumers won't pay more money just for the novelty of getting a pizza delivered by robot. Similarly, Dominoes can't afford to bilk customers too much with high deliver charges because there are plenty of other pizza businesses that are going to use it as an opportunity to undercut Dominoes and get more business for themselves.
Could just be a joke that fell flat..
Or they just open their app for the other company that they drive with and use that instead. This isn't really going to stop anyone who doesn't want to quit.
How big of an issue is this anyways? I would imagine that most drivers aren't pulling 10 hour shifts to start with, though there may be a few that have nothing better to do.
It's laptops and desktop computers. What's left to "innovate" outside of some radically new technology that makes one of the individual components better?
I wish Apple would quit trying to come out with new stuff all the time and get the bugs and quirks in their products ironed out. Take two years and don't release any wildly new hardware or software features and just refine the hell out of what's out there now.
They're probably in for an ugly time of things. The people in power manage to stay in power because they can afford to pay for their own protection and to placate the population with all of that money. Add in those societies being among the more repressive on the planet and you've got a powder keg that's ready to erupt. The only question is how violent it will become and whether or not it will devolve into outright civil war as we've recently seen with other countries in the region.
Free market absolutists would be quick to point out that when the government grants companies legal monopolies and competition is barred from competing, you don't have much of a free market. Government would have far fewer problems to solve if it weren't creating so many of them to begin with. When you don't have to worry about outside competition taking your business, is it any wonder that a company can devote maximum effort to rent seeking behavior like this?
Government granted monopolies is about the biggest possible way to interfere with a free market outside of making the sale and purchase of something illegal.
Also, if a city wants to set up their own local service to compete I don't see any problems with it as long as they don't bar anyone else from business or give themselves the same kind of monopolistic advantages that were being sold to individual cable companies. Also, these measures typically come about as a result of ballot measures by that city rather than as a result of concentrated government power (I don't recall everyone in town voting to give Comcast a monopoly) so it's far more democratic as well.
Equating municipal broadband services with wealth redistribution schemes is missing the mark by quite a bit. Also, having the government punish companies that benefited from the government's bad actions well after the fact is stupid and will only lead to prolonged court battles that the government won't win. Quit worrying about trying to make everything even and fair and just get rid of the rules that keep perpetuating a shitty situation.
Not to defend Kaspersky, but this seems to be the trend with most security (or perhaps it's even more general than that) software. A new product comes out that's free of cruft, relatively easy to use, and works effectively. Eventually it turns to shit and it becomes as bloated and craptastic as the other software that it replaced some years ago. Fortunately, there's a new product that has just come out . . .
I think the bigger problem is that flying as an experience kind of sucks in general (not all of this is the fault of the airlines) and big planes are mostly good for a hub-based model where you might need some additional connecting flights with the possibility for long layovers in between. Mid-sized planes have much greater range now and unless you're making some truly long haul international flights, it's not a major obstacle to have direct flights between the smaller airports that these hubs used to connect. A lot of budget airlines have sprung up to do exactly that and the narrow focus on a few routes lets them keep costs down which is as big of a factor as anything else.
I think it just goes to show that simplistic ideas of good and evil are useless as soon as they come into contact with the real world.
If China is so evil would it be good for us to overthrow them and liberate its people, or is that too an evil act? If this makes life better for the average person in China, then it's pointless to spend much time worrying over whether or not Google makes an extra buck or where this action rates on some kind of morality scale that the people who like to chide Google for failing to follow couldn't stick to either even if they tried. Part or probably most of the devices people use to access the internet come from China, so none of us are clearly above doing business with China either.
My point is that society as a whole doesn't really care, not that there isn't some individual person out there that isn't trying to solve the problem. You should be able to figure out that in plain language saying "no one" doesn't imply a universal quantifier across the entire population. Individual teachers probably care (until they get burned out) but they can do fuck all and probably have their hands tied by the system as much as anything. The same goes for other groups and individuals as well, who lack the political or financial capital to do anything on a large scale.
The point is that Republicans don't really care because they're largely not based in the inner cities so from their perspective it's someone else's problem and they're not all that keen about being made to pay for it either. The Democrats don't really care either because to the extent that people in the inner city vote, they're sure as fuck not going to vote Republican so there's no incentive to do anything for that small part of their base when lip service does fine.
Any small groups or individuals trying out different systems (whether they work or not) don't have the political power to accomplish anything themselves, especially not against any intrenched interests and the larger political parties are mostly apathetic towards that overall cause for reasons stated above. Even if those new systems do get better results, they're probably not so much better to the point that it becomes blindingly obvious that it's a better way. I'll admit that I haven't read much of any research on the topic though so if there are a large number of good studies showing that charter schools do a better job, I'm more than open to reading through them.
Excess power isn't a huge problem as there's almost always something that can be done with it that may only be financially reasonable to do when there's a surplus or costs are low. One easy example is to pump water uphill into a reservoir that can be used to generate power through hydro-electric when there's a sudden spike in demand. Sure it would be more efficient to use a gigantic battery to store all of it, but those aren't necessarily cheaper and some cities may have the kind of geography that makes a setup like that easier to implement.
I'm sure there's plenty of cryptocurrency yahoos that would gladly load up trucks full of GPUs to drive them to wherever power is cheap due to excess.
It's okay in a lot of areas, it's just that no one really gives a shit about the inner city school districts and so they've gone to absolute shit. If you remove that from the equation, the U.S. as a whole is quite comparable to other western democracies. The U.S. has seems more content to let this problem fester and to deal with the consequences rather than tackle it head on so the problem just goes from bad to worse in a lot of ways.
On a side note, if there weren't so many useless (not as in they suck at their jobs, just useless in that their jobs don't improve educational outcomes in any measurable way) administrators soaking up money, we could pay teachers a hell of a lot more. The U.S. spends more on education as a percentage of GDP than other countries that do as well or better than us, and over time our spending on education as a percentage of GDP has increased. Even though you hear about cutbacks all the time (who pays attention when funding is increased?) the trend has been moving upward over time. So it's not strictly a money problem.
Here's a good report (PDF warning) that has looked into how public education has changed in the U.S. over time. The increase in administrative staff has done nothing to improve outcomes and removing the excess would allow for an additional ~$11,000 in yearly salary for every teacher.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
If they do nothing instead of spending their time committing crime it might well be worth it. If my options are to pay people to stay at home or to pay police, prison guards, and and much larger legal system I'd prefer to avoid creating bigger government for no real benefit.
Also, we're already paying loads of taxes to fund various welfare programs. You could have a reasonably sized UBI by getting rid of the various different programs and putting everything towards a UBI instead. That also has the added benefit of greatly simplifying the system and making another huge chunk of government bureaucracy redundant.
No system is going to be perfect, and there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system or who add no value to society, but they exist independent of the system. However, that shouldn't stop us from making pragmatic choices when possible.
The Gawker name might be dead, but you're a fool if you think they already haven't been replaced by a different outfit of the same style under a new name. You can say that when it comes down to it, not many people are actually willing to put down their own money to pay for Gawker, but there are loads who are willing to give it their attention and Gawker made plenty of money from showing ads to that captive audience over the years.
This is a failure of one particular entity. I suspect that total viewership for yellow journalism as a whole hasn't budged a bit, and as long as there is consumer demand for something, other people are going to strive to fulfill that demand.
If states wanted to effectively ensure that Net Neutrality existed they could ban cities from offering monopoly rights to ISPs. I suspect that if providers were to actually have to compete for customers based on their service, you'd quickly see that companies which try to throttle certain types of traffic would be avoided by consumers.
You can't have a system that allows a private business to effectively function like a utility without requiring it to also behave like a utility. Since it does not appear easy to make these businesses behave like utilities, then it does not make sense to give them any kind of monopoly rights for the infrastructure.
A fully blown automated vehicle that's going cross on cross-country trips from arbitrary start and end points? Probably not.
However, if you told me that some city had some kind of automated mini-cabs that could ferry people around certain parts of downtown or other restricted areas, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.
It's actually a future hedge against a robot apocalypse. We want the machines to see that people are nice and courteous, because they're also going to watch videos like this. That poor bastard is going to be first against the wall.
While what you say is true; this only makes Cape Town look like architects of their own peril. They could have started building desalination plants, or working on viable alternatives long ago before it was crunch time.
To some degree this is true of just about everything and everyone though. There's all manner of things you or I could and probably should be doing today to make a better future for ourselves by anticipating problems we're likely to face and taking steps to solve them now and to some degree we likely do things like this such as investing for retirement, etc. The problem is that this particular problem is outside of the scope of any one individual.
You can blame it on governments (and by extension the people who elected them) but they're notoriously short-sighted as well and it's pretty difficult to run on and win with a platform about addressing things that may be twenty years down the road instead of the current set of problems people are facing, probably due largely to short-sighted thinking in the past. But that's just the nature of the beast. Most people don't care about identifying and mitigating problems far down the road, so the governments they elect really don't either unless they've run out of pressing current issues.
I think the biggest reason for any Apple presence being felt at CES at any time was because they held their own conference during the same week but at a different venue. They've since stopped having that yearly conference and instead just hold their product events when they have some product to announce, which doesn't really sync up with CES any more.
Most of the Caribbean islands have much smaller populations, around 100,000 or less and the islands with millions of people tend to have several lakes and rivers. It's a lot easier to deal with smaller populations, especially when that infrastructure has already been built and adjusted to meet the needs of population over time. Setting up new desalination plants to support millions of people is a logistical nightmare even if you have a highly competent team tackling the problem.
Yup. Most people just want to do their work and then go home and get on with their lives. The majority of people tend to keep their heads down and avoid stuff like this which is both why we don't hear about it very often and also part of the reason that things like this can fester for so long.
I don't think it's possible to maybe even healthy to try to stifle any conversation that isn't work related. There's always going to be political talk around water coolers or over beers at lunch, but when people start trying to effect company policy or process with their own personal projects, it tends to piss off at least one other person who doesn't care for whatever is being pushed. It's the same with more banal stuff like people evangelizing some new programming language or other piece of technology instead of anything political. The rest of the team doesn't want to switch to a new language or framework just because someone did a small side project in it and thinks its cool.
Yeah, the summary seems designed to bait people, but at least this story has some connection to technology unlike a lot of political crap that gets thrown up here some days. It would probably be better to leave the aspects unrelated to the technology side of it out, or it just stirs up shit in the comments. Or just more shit than usual I suppose.
I think you should avoid eye contact with gorillas as they may view it as a form of aggression. There was an incident at a Dutch zoo several years ago where a Gorilla escaped its exhibit and attacked a women who was constantly visiting the zoo and making eye contact and smiling at the Gorilla (why they didn't kick her out or ban her I don't know) which was making it absolutely pissed.
Regardless of how much or little they're like us, or the amount of intelligence they posses, they are ridiculously strong and can treat an adult human like a rag doll.