The law may be bad or it may be good, but it's clear. It does give the President full discretion.
The U.S. was founded in part on the principles that its bad to have that much power concentrated into an office governed by a sole person. Of course part of the country only cares in this case because the person doing the banning isn't in their political tribe, but I don't have to find their reasons pure if they accomplish the same result I favor. Not that I disagree with the sentiment though. We should restrict immigration from those areas and make sure we have adequate screening in place for applicants, but that should come from Congress, not the office of the President.
Yours as well. I'm sure that there's something which the government does that they argue is morally appropriate for them to do because it results in a greater good or is equivalent to the harm caused by their action (that would be judged immoral should either you or I undertake it as private individuals) which you disagree with, but how can you argue against it or even claim that the government isn't acting morally since the balance is stated to be essentially moral?
Ultimately it just comes down to squabbles about how immoral was the harm or how beneficial was the argument. Utterly arbitrary and probably only positions taken well after the fact instead of something that a person could have arrived at before. This just leads to people arranging their beliefs afterwards in order to support or dismiss some outcome rather than being able to anticipate an outcome prior to its occurrence. I'd argue that the latter is highly preferable, but requires consistency in moral beliefs which isn't something your argument allows for, at least not with a high degree of certainty.
Drinkypoo (imo) wasn't arguing that the ends justify the means; he was arguing that one's intentions are a significant part of the equation.
Another equally useless line of argument. There's even the pithy "pathway to hell paved with good intentions" from bog knows how long ago that encapsulates the idea of how useless that notion is.
I also used an intentionally hyperbolic comparison to show the extents to which someone could take that line of argument. I probably could have started off with something that an actual person might might (though there probably are some people who would argue the Holocaust is okay, but we'd instantly regard them as nutters and tune out their argument or their reasoning is even more flawed for other reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) use or you would accept as a reasonable argument, but the point is that somewhere along the line of increasingly dubious reasoning you would draw a line in the sand and reject the argument that the means were acceptable or that a person couldn't have possibly had good intentions or that their moral compass is so unattached to reality that their idea of good is utterly alien.
At that point, your mortality becomes arbitrary. You only accept your own line of reasoning up to a certain point, but it's probably not the same point as anyone else. Now we're stuck trying to argue a line in the sand where atrocity becomes okay because the intentions were good, or because enough good comes of it to justify the atrocity itself. That's how little tyrannies start to sneak in, such as police being able to arrest you for anything the find in plain sight in your residence if they just happen to be pursuing a criminal through it for completely unrelated reasons. You won't be able to get that evidence tossed in court, because the police's motives will be judged to be pure, even though in any other circumstance they couldn't have entered your premises to legal collect that evidence.
So even if you want to argue that atrocity can be justified if a person's motives are pure (and good luck judging that in some non-arbitrary manner) you can still find a position that some will argue is reprehensible. I could use hyperbole as before, but I've presented a very real scenario above. I don't know whether you find it acceptable that the law is permitted to act in that way or not, but it's done by using the same argument that you've presented. Maybe you're fine with the police having that power (I'm not) and we haven't crossed the line in the sand where you're no longer comfortable with your own line of reasoning being used, but we could certainly get there with enough time.
I'm sure that upon reaching it you could invent some new rule that excuses that case, but now you've got a wildly complex and intricate morality and I'm going to have to ask you to write it down for me in advance so I won't have to accuse you of making things up as go.
It's actually worse than that though if you're just looking at the architecture. The 7700k has a 20% clock speed advantage over a 2700k, which means that their architectural improvements aren't even 7.5% per year. Both of those chips exist within a similar TDP bracket as well (91W vs. 95W) so it isn't as though Intel has been using process improvements to offer the performance at lower power consumption levels either. And that's only certain benchmarks as there are others where Intel's older chips perhaps only fair worse by single digit percentages once accounting for clock speed differences. Sandy Bridge was a great chip for overclocking and it wasn't difficult to get as much as 4.4 GHz without putting a lot of effort into it. Some enthusiasts have been able to get up to 5 GHz with a good chip and cooling solution. The newer Core i7 chips usually require de-lidding since Intel uses a substandard TIM which doesn't transfer heat effectively enough.
Intel needs a new microarchitecture to replace Core. Core was an exceptional design, especially considering what it replaced and how much the early performance gains were like if you bought an early Nehalem CPU. Hell, even Core itself traces its roots back to the P6 microarchitecture after Intel abandoned Prescott (which was sold as the Pentium 4 back in the wild days of the clock speed wars) which goes back decades. It's pretty clear that Core is tapped out in terms of what can be squeezed out of it and Intel needs to go back to the drawing board like AMD did and use all of the lessons they've learned to make a new architecture.
Even if AMD's offerings aren't quite as good as Intel's, they'll still be closer than they ever have before and it will allow AMD to challenge Intel in their high-margin consumer market segments or in markets were AMD hasn't been relevant in years. Intel could afford to tread water while AMD was using their failed Bulldozer architecture, as Intel would just as gladly sell you a 4 year old CPU as a new one if the prices hadn't moved much, but now AMD is going to erode those price points or offer a competing product if they don't undercut Intel. Intel will still have a process advantage with their own fabs, but they need a new architecture to widen the gap if they want to have any hope of maintaining their profit levels.
The problem is that the union can argue for a $40/hour wage until their blue in the face, but they can't change economic reality. Say that the company gives into the union and their employees are now making $80k/year, which is great until they company goes under within a few years because its incapable of being competitive with other local or even foreign companies. So now the union has to argue for protectionist tariffs in order to support their workers, which is basically arguing that I'm forced to restrict my purchasing choices because they think that they somehow deserve to be the only game in town. At that point, why don't they just deserve $80/hour wages because its no like anyone has a choice.
Rather the union should argue that it makes more sense for the company to relocate. There are plenty of parts of the country were $40/year is enough to own a home. Too many unions labor under the delusion that if they believe strongly enough, or fight with the company enough that two and two can be made to come out five.
Therefore, while it remains a morally questionable act, in balance the purpose would be (in my ever-so-humble opinion) essentially moral.
What a terrible line of reasoning. What's to stop you from justifying murder or any form of atrocity by claiming that some moral good came of it therefore it was on the whole essentially moral? Hell, one could argue that he Holocaust was essentially moral since it gave rise to the U.N. and governments reluctant to engage in global wars. Maybe that's not enough equivalence for you, but as the punchline to an old joke goes, we've already established you're a whore, now we're just arguing over price. If there's no price high enough in your mind to reach that balance, then how could you argue against someone who claims there's nothing that can cancel out the immorality of deceit in this original case?
Still not a good metric, unless you assume all work is being divided evenly and is equally difficult or trivial. This is rarely true and good companies often identify who their most skilled employees are and assign them the difficult work that only they may be able to handle effectively. If you produce a small amount of code that only you could have produced because it was incredibly difficult, why should it matter if some other yahoo churned out three times as many features if they're all trivial by comparison.
You could make an interesting argument for a UBI policy where you pay people to only have at most one child. Over time it would reduce the population and would probably be cheaper to pay people not to have children than the expenses incurred by society should that person have been born. It also allows more resources to be directed at an individual child ensuring better outcomes. Having a guaranteed income and support would remove that natural human incentive to have more children when poor in order to ensure that some of them will be able to care for their parents in old age.
They've already started to automate, so it's pretty unlikely that they'll have that problem for much longer. Unless Chinese robots are cheaper than U.S. robots, we should probably invest more heavily in our own robotic manufacturing base just because when human labor is no longer a large part of the cost of the goods, China doesn't have anywhere near as much advantage.
This is why you see big companies constantly patenting little things that are seemingly obvious or otherwise inane. If you have a patent of your own, it becomes much easier to refute the claim of some other company that you're infringing on their patent. Then they would have to spend time trying to invalidate your patent, which might make it easier to invalidate their own. It probably doesn't even make it to court though as the legal team would just send them a nice "fuck off" letter in reply and the legal hyenas for the patent troll will just look for somewhere else to do their bottom feeding.
It doesn't matter if it costs more, that's already an accepted fact. What matters is that he increased cost is still less than the additional cost they incur manufacturing elsewhere. With China right next door, India will never be a major manufacturing center for electronics, but if supplying the market in India (as small or large as it may be) allows Apple to generate more profit, they'll make the move. This is Cook's area of expertise, so I suspect that if Apple moves forward with these plans that they've figured out how to make money with this arrangement or expect the market in India to grow enough to compensate for the added manufacturing costs.
I think part of the problem with mathematics is that it's taught as a series of formulas that you need to remember and use. That's an idiotic way of teaching almost anything and it's no wonder that people struggle with it. You could probably have someone remember all the syntax for the English language (or a computer language for that matter) but until they've moved beyond just knowing the rules to a point where they intuitively understand why those rules exist and what those patterns (formulas) actually represent, they couldn't produce much of any actual interest like a poem.
The same holds true for math. The formula you give is for finding the roots of a quadratic polynomial, something like looks like ax^2 + bx + c, which you've probably seen all over the place. However it's really difficult to tell just from looking at something like 4x^2 - 7x + 3 is going to cross the intercept on a graph. The formula you've listed is just another way of writing ax^2 + bx + c = 0, but we've just rearranged the pieces so that the question we're interested in answering (what values of x make the whole thing equal to 0) is easier to figure out because we can just plug int 4, -7, and 3 in order to get our answers. If you want to see the set of transformations, just search for a derivation of the quadratic formula on Google which will walk through the sequence of steps to get from one to the other.
That's really what math is at the core. It's just saying that if we state that these properties as true, then we can use them to find other things that must also be true. Math usually isn't taught like this though, so we end up with a bunch of formulas and no real understanding of how they connect to the world. The formula itself really isn't important, it's just a shorthand notation to describe some concept that could just as easily be done using pictures or a more long-winded plain language description. But if you understand the underlying concept, you can always derive the formula. However, if no one ever bothers to explain what's going on, it's not surprising that a lot of students get frustrated with math or have no idea why a particular formulas works. I secretly suspect that a lot of math teachers don't really have much of an idea of what they're doing and are just reciting from the text book so any questions from students about why the formula has to be that way are dismissed by the instructor or not properly answered.
You've probably never seen the film. It's a direct reference to students who were considered by society to somehow be unable to learn those mathematics, not only being able to learn that material, but also being able to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery when the world decided there was no way those poor dregs could have actually amounted to anything and learned the material for themselves. It's a pretty clear indication that the U.S. has plenty of capable workers, but that our education system fails them and that society fails to recognize their potential for success.
Also, it's pretty damned elitist to think that someone in education has a dead-end job or one that they couldn't possibly enjoy.
You'd think so, but Apple could just borrow the money to buy Intel and keep their foreign cash horde invested in whatever the think is most profitable (maybe even U.S. treasury bonds) and given our fucked up tax code they could probably find a way to deduct that. However, the idea makes no sense as Intel's worth is derived from selling their processors to third parties and Apple as a company has no desire to do that and would destroy Intel's value as a company if they tried to keep the chips to themselves. The only value Intel has to them is cutting edge fab tech, but since Intel isn't selling that to any of Apple's competitors in the ARM SoC space it's basically worthless to Apple.
If Apple wanted an x86 company for chips, they could buy AMD at fraction of the cost of Intel or at least grab enough of a controlling interest to get some value out of it, supposing they can navigate the minefield of the licensing terms between AMD and Intel and anything else that might pop up. Even that doesn't matter much as Apple has a pretty good team doing their chip development. They outclass anything else in the market and have a further edge in that they can tailor the rest of their platform to the chip or vice versa.
I recently found myself in a similar situation where I was on a plan where I couldn't get the maximum speed because I had and old cable modem (DOCSIS 2.0, yeah it's old) that couldn't support the speed that I was getting. I didn't realize this until I had called in about an unrelated issue and the tech (bog bless him for being a decent lad, despite working in the whore pits at the local cable monopoly) noted that irregularity. Not that it really mattered because I had signed up for the 500 GB plan years ago (at the time it seemed like an unlimited amount) and despite the speed being increased tenfold over the years since I first started service with the company, my bandwidth cap hasn't budged at all. I upgraded to a newer modem, but really it's like driving a faster car down the same toll road with a brick wall at the end. I can't go any further, but I can hit the wall a lot faster.
Something can be morally wrong, but still the pragmatic and correct choice when viewed from societies perspective. For example, few people would argue that using taxes to pay for police is bad idea, though there are some who make that argument. Personally, I would say that locking someone in a small cell for the rest of their life at age 16 is morally reprehensible, but from the government's point of view letting some criminals out into society is only likely to cause more total net harm, so the pragmatic choice is a lifetime sentence or execution. Neither of those a free, so naturally you have to force other people to pay taxes to build the prison and hire the guards.
Social or subsidized health care only works as long as it can add more total net value to a society than it takes from it. Like other social programs its great when it can more easily transition members of society who have fallen on hard times into productive members of society again. If it fails to do that (or worse yet enables or encourages individuals to remain unproductive), it becomes a burden on society and possibly not worth the cost to society.
No one wants to die and healthcare costs are essentially unlimited, but even a society that devotes all production not tied up in agriculture or other necessary services cannot produce enough healthcare to satisfy the needs of society. So it just becomes a matter of how a society is willing to spend. If you deem it a person's absolute right to have as much healthcare as they want, then it becomes everyone's obligation to pay for it, either through taxes or by requiring them to devote some of their labor towards providing that healthcare.
If you're going to be pragmatic and argue that having a required single-payer government monopsony on healthcare is a net positive, I think you also need to be pragmatic and willing and able to determine when its no longer reasonable to provide a person with as much healthcare as they want, as at a certain point any medical procedures are just prolonging someone's life so that they can consume more medical procedures without that person being able to contribute any reasonably amount of productivity back to society.
In the modern world it's all but impossible to escape from society. There's no frontier at present where an individual can go to be free of all laws save those of nature. If you can always argue that another person should be compelled to use their labor for the benefit of society at the expense of the individual, at some point you cross from just collecting taxes to what is essentially serfdom.
They won't scrap it, because replacing the algorithm with human bodies to do it is far more expensive. However, it's a defensive game from Facebook's perspective. It doesn't matter if they're right 99 times out of 100, it's when they get it wrong and part of their user base throws a giant tantrum and puts their giant persecution complex on display that Facebook will have to apologize and take their lumps in order to appease everyone. Hell, I think this has already happened a few times with their existing algorithms promoting something that was completely off the reservation.
I give this at most a week before something obviously fake gets promoted or the spammers figure out how to get around the algorithm and Facebook has to apologize again and looks completely inept.
The AI would probably have an advantage as its less likely to have discerning tells of its own because all of the easily discoverable ones would have been caught much earlier on, whereas human players who've only played against other human players might not have spotted and obvious and exploitable pattern in their play yet and even though the AI "knows" what it is, it can't easily tell them what they're doing wrong.
Jobs certainly had a good understanding of what people wanted and how to sell it to them, but I think the reason that they succeeded as a company had more to do with Cook. You can have as many grand visions for a great products as you want, and whether you're correct about them or not, you'll always fail if you can't execute.
Cook was instrumental in taking Apple from a level where they could make a nice product that they could sell at a higher price to afford the production costs necessary to meet their artsy design standards and aesthetics and turning them into a company that could demand exclusives and fund manufacturers in order to keep their prices the same but drop their costs to the point that their company is one of the most valuable in the world despite having a low double digit share of the market.
Cook probably has no grand visions for the next big thing, but he doesn't need to. He just needs to find someone or a group of someones that can see where Apple should pivot to next and Cook can make sure that they can turn out a good product for lower cost than many of the other companies that are using lower tier components or worse materials. I also think people are too quick to praise Jobs as some kind of genius. He had a lot of successes, or perhaps more than most in his position, but he also had a lot of failures and from some of the stories that have come up about them he wasn't completely responsible for the successes himself or sometimes was initially against them or had an alternate conception that probably would have failed.
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The law may be bad or it may be good, but it's clear. It does give the President full discretion.
The U.S. was founded in part on the principles that its bad to have that much power concentrated into an office governed by a sole person. Of course part of the country only cares in this case because the person doing the banning isn't in their political tribe, but I don't have to find their reasons pure if they accomplish the same result I favor. Not that I disagree with the sentiment though. We should restrict immigration from those areas and make sure we have adequate screening in place for applicants, but that should come from Congress, not the office of the President.
Yours as well. I'm sure that there's something which the government does that they argue is morally appropriate for them to do because it results in a greater good or is equivalent to the harm caused by their action (that would be judged immoral should either you or I undertake it as private individuals) which you disagree with, but how can you argue against it or even claim that the government isn't acting morally since the balance is stated to be essentially moral?
Ultimately it just comes down to squabbles about how immoral was the harm or how beneficial was the argument. Utterly arbitrary and probably only positions taken well after the fact instead of something that a person could have arrived at before. This just leads to people arranging their beliefs afterwards in order to support or dismiss some outcome rather than being able to anticipate an outcome prior to its occurrence. I'd argue that the latter is highly preferable, but requires consistency in moral beliefs which isn't something your argument allows for, at least not with a high degree of certainty.
Drinkypoo (imo) wasn't arguing that the ends justify the means; he was arguing that one's intentions are a significant part of the equation.
Another equally useless line of argument. There's even the pithy "pathway to hell paved with good intentions" from bog knows how long ago that encapsulates the idea of how useless that notion is.
I also used an intentionally hyperbolic comparison to show the extents to which someone could take that line of argument. I probably could have started off with something that an actual person might might (though there probably are some people who would argue the Holocaust is okay, but we'd instantly regard them as nutters and tune out their argument or their reasoning is even more flawed for other reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) use or you would accept as a reasonable argument, but the point is that somewhere along the line of increasingly dubious reasoning you would draw a line in the sand and reject the argument that the means were acceptable or that a person couldn't have possibly had good intentions or that their moral compass is so unattached to reality that their idea of good is utterly alien.
At that point, your mortality becomes arbitrary. You only accept your own line of reasoning up to a certain point, but it's probably not the same point as anyone else. Now we're stuck trying to argue a line in the sand where atrocity becomes okay because the intentions were good, or because enough good comes of it to justify the atrocity itself. That's how little tyrannies start to sneak in, such as police being able to arrest you for anything the find in plain sight in your residence if they just happen to be pursuing a criminal through it for completely unrelated reasons. You won't be able to get that evidence tossed in court, because the police's motives will be judged to be pure, even though in any other circumstance they couldn't have entered your premises to legal collect that evidence.
So even if you want to argue that atrocity can be justified if a person's motives are pure (and good luck judging that in some non-arbitrary manner) you can still find a position that some will argue is reprehensible. I could use hyperbole as before, but I've presented a very real scenario above. I don't know whether you find it acceptable that the law is permitted to act in that way or not, but it's done by using the same argument that you've presented. Maybe you're fine with the police having that power (I'm not) and we haven't crossed the line in the sand where you're no longer comfortable with your own line of reasoning being used, but we could certainly get there with enough time.
I'm sure that upon reaching it you could invent some new rule that excuses that case, but now you've got a wildly complex and intricate morality and I'm going to have to ask you to write it down for me in advance so I won't have to accuse you of making things up as go.
More proof that Huxley was right and Orwell was wrong. You don't need totalitarianism to enslave mankind, just a nearly infinite amount of amusing distractions. The argument is presented nicely here in web-comic form.
Nah, they've just got a monkey in every truck to remind the drivers.
It's actually worse than that though if you're just looking at the architecture. The 7700k has a 20% clock speed advantage over a 2700k, which means that their architectural improvements aren't even 7.5% per year. Both of those chips exist within a similar TDP bracket as well (91W vs. 95W) so it isn't as though Intel has been using process improvements to offer the performance at lower power consumption levels either. And that's only certain benchmarks as there are others where Intel's older chips perhaps only fair worse by single digit percentages once accounting for clock speed differences. Sandy Bridge was a great chip for overclocking and it wasn't difficult to get as much as 4.4 GHz without putting a lot of effort into it. Some enthusiasts have been able to get up to 5 GHz with a good chip and cooling solution. The newer Core i7 chips usually require de-lidding since Intel uses a substandard TIM which doesn't transfer heat effectively enough.
Intel needs a new microarchitecture to replace Core. Core was an exceptional design, especially considering what it replaced and how much the early performance gains were like if you bought an early Nehalem CPU. Hell, even Core itself traces its roots back to the P6 microarchitecture after Intel abandoned Prescott (which was sold as the Pentium 4 back in the wild days of the clock speed wars) which goes back decades. It's pretty clear that Core is tapped out in terms of what can be squeezed out of it and Intel needs to go back to the drawing board like AMD did and use all of the lessons they've learned to make a new architecture.
Even if AMD's offerings aren't quite as good as Intel's, they'll still be closer than they ever have before and it will allow AMD to challenge Intel in their high-margin consumer market segments or in markets were AMD hasn't been relevant in years. Intel could afford to tread water while AMD was using their failed Bulldozer architecture, as Intel would just as gladly sell you a 4 year old CPU as a new one if the prices hadn't moved much, but now AMD is going to erode those price points or offer a competing product if they don't undercut Intel. Intel will still have a process advantage with their own fabs, but they need a new architecture to widen the gap if they want to have any hope of maintaining their profit levels.
The problem is that the union can argue for a $40/hour wage until their blue in the face, but they can't change economic reality. Say that the company gives into the union and their employees are now making $80k/year, which is great until they company goes under within a few years because its incapable of being competitive with other local or even foreign companies. So now the union has to argue for protectionist tariffs in order to support their workers, which is basically arguing that I'm forced to restrict my purchasing choices because they think that they somehow deserve to be the only game in town. At that point, why don't they just deserve $80/hour wages because its no like anyone has a choice.
Rather the union should argue that it makes more sense for the company to relocate. There are plenty of parts of the country were $40/year is enough to own a home. Too many unions labor under the delusion that if they believe strongly enough, or fight with the company enough that two and two can be made to come out five.
Therefore, while it remains a morally questionable act, in balance the purpose would be (in my ever-so-humble opinion) essentially moral.
What a terrible line of reasoning. What's to stop you from justifying murder or any form of atrocity by claiming that some moral good came of it therefore it was on the whole essentially moral? Hell, one could argue that he Holocaust was essentially moral since it gave rise to the U.N. and governments reluctant to engage in global wars. Maybe that's not enough equivalence for you, but as the punchline to an old joke goes, we've already established you're a whore, now we're just arguing over price. If there's no price high enough in your mind to reach that balance, then how could you argue against someone who claims there's nothing that can cancel out the immorality of deceit in this original case?
Still not a good metric, unless you assume all work is being divided evenly and is equally difficult or trivial. This is rarely true and good companies often identify who their most skilled employees are and assign them the difficult work that only they may be able to handle effectively. If you produce a small amount of code that only you could have produced because it was incredibly difficult, why should it matter if some other yahoo churned out three times as many features if they're all trivial by comparison.
You could make an interesting argument for a UBI policy where you pay people to only have at most one child. Over time it would reduce the population and would probably be cheaper to pay people not to have children than the expenses incurred by society should that person have been born. It also allows more resources to be directed at an individual child ensuring better outcomes. Having a guaranteed income and support would remove that natural human incentive to have more children when poor in order to ensure that some of them will be able to care for their parents in old age.
Sorry, but you can't piss off and alienate a PRODUCT.
I take it you've never been around beef cattle before.
Pshh... It's not like they've built a wall or anything.
They've already started to automate, so it's pretty unlikely that they'll have that problem for much longer. Unless Chinese robots are cheaper than U.S. robots, we should probably invest more heavily in our own robotic manufacturing base just because when human labor is no longer a large part of the cost of the goods, China doesn't have anywhere near as much advantage.
This is why you see big companies constantly patenting little things that are seemingly obvious or otherwise inane. If you have a patent of your own, it becomes much easier to refute the claim of some other company that you're infringing on their patent. Then they would have to spend time trying to invalidate your patent, which might make it easier to invalidate their own. It probably doesn't even make it to court though as the legal team would just send them a nice "fuck off" letter in reply and the legal hyenas for the patent troll will just look for somewhere else to do their bottom feeding.
It doesn't matter if it costs more, that's already an accepted fact. What matters is that he increased cost is still less than the additional cost they incur manufacturing elsewhere. With China right next door, India will never be a major manufacturing center for electronics, but if supplying the market in India (as small or large as it may be) allows Apple to generate more profit, they'll make the move. This is Cook's area of expertise, so I suspect that if Apple moves forward with these plans that they've figured out how to make money with this arrangement or expect the market in India to grow enough to compensate for the added manufacturing costs.
I think part of the problem with mathematics is that it's taught as a series of formulas that you need to remember and use. That's an idiotic way of teaching almost anything and it's no wonder that people struggle with it. You could probably have someone remember all the syntax for the English language (or a computer language for that matter) but until they've moved beyond just knowing the rules to a point where they intuitively understand why those rules exist and what those patterns (formulas) actually represent, they couldn't produce much of any actual interest like a poem.
The same holds true for math. The formula you give is for finding the roots of a quadratic polynomial, something like looks like ax^2 + bx + c, which you've probably seen all over the place. However it's really difficult to tell just from looking at something like 4x^2 - 7x + 3 is going to cross the intercept on a graph. The formula you've listed is just another way of writing ax^2 + bx + c = 0, but we've just rearranged the pieces so that the question we're interested in answering (what values of x make the whole thing equal to 0) is easier to figure out because we can just plug int 4, -7, and 3 in order to get our answers. If you want to see the set of transformations, just search for a derivation of the quadratic formula on Google which will walk through the sequence of steps to get from one to the other.
That's really what math is at the core. It's just saying that if we state that these properties as true, then we can use them to find other things that must also be true. Math usually isn't taught like this though, so we end up with a bunch of formulas and no real understanding of how they connect to the world. The formula itself really isn't important, it's just a shorthand notation to describe some concept that could just as easily be done using pictures or a more long-winded plain language description. But if you understand the underlying concept, you can always derive the formula. However, if no one ever bothers to explain what's going on, it's not surprising that a lot of students get frustrated with math or have no idea why a particular formulas works. I secretly suspect that a lot of math teachers don't really have much of an idea of what they're doing and are just reciting from the text book so any questions from students about why the formula has to be that way are dismissed by the instructor or not properly answered.
You've probably never seen the film. It's a direct reference to students who were considered by society to somehow be unable to learn those mathematics, not only being able to learn that material, but also being able to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery when the world decided there was no way those poor dregs could have actually amounted to anything and learned the material for themselves. It's a pretty clear indication that the U.S. has plenty of capable workers, but that our education system fails them and that society fails to recognize their potential for success.
Also, it's pretty damned elitist to think that someone in education has a dead-end job or one that they couldn't possibly enjoy.
You'd think so, but Apple could just borrow the money to buy Intel and keep their foreign cash horde invested in whatever the think is most profitable (maybe even U.S. treasury bonds) and given our fucked up tax code they could probably find a way to deduct that. However, the idea makes no sense as Intel's worth is derived from selling their processors to third parties and Apple as a company has no desire to do that and would destroy Intel's value as a company if they tried to keep the chips to themselves. The only value Intel has to them is cutting edge fab tech, but since Intel isn't selling that to any of Apple's competitors in the ARM SoC space it's basically worthless to Apple.
If Apple wanted an x86 company for chips, they could buy AMD at fraction of the cost of Intel or at least grab enough of a controlling interest to get some value out of it, supposing they can navigate the minefield of the licensing terms between AMD and Intel and anything else that might pop up. Even that doesn't matter much as Apple has a pretty good team doing their chip development. They outclass anything else in the market and have a further edge in that they can tailor the rest of their platform to the chip or vice versa.
I recently found myself in a similar situation where I was on a plan where I couldn't get the maximum speed because I had and old cable modem (DOCSIS 2.0, yeah it's old) that couldn't support the speed that I was getting. I didn't realize this until I had called in about an unrelated issue and the tech (bog bless him for being a decent lad, despite working in the whore pits at the local cable monopoly) noted that irregularity. Not that it really mattered because I had signed up for the 500 GB plan years ago (at the time it seemed like an unlimited amount) and despite the speed being increased tenfold over the years since I first started service with the company, my bandwidth cap hasn't budged at all. I upgraded to a newer modem, but really it's like driving a faster car down the same toll road with a brick wall at the end. I can't go any further, but I can hit the wall a lot faster.
Something can be morally wrong, but still the pragmatic and correct choice when viewed from societies perspective. For example, few people would argue that using taxes to pay for police is bad idea, though there are some who make that argument. Personally, I would say that locking someone in a small cell for the rest of their life at age 16 is morally reprehensible, but from the government's point of view letting some criminals out into society is only likely to cause more total net harm, so the pragmatic choice is a lifetime sentence or execution. Neither of those a free, so naturally you have to force other people to pay taxes to build the prison and hire the guards.
Social or subsidized health care only works as long as it can add more total net value to a society than it takes from it. Like other social programs its great when it can more easily transition members of society who have fallen on hard times into productive members of society again. If it fails to do that (or worse yet enables or encourages individuals to remain unproductive), it becomes a burden on society and possibly not worth the cost to society.
No one wants to die and healthcare costs are essentially unlimited, but even a society that devotes all production not tied up in agriculture or other necessary services cannot produce enough healthcare to satisfy the needs of society. So it just becomes a matter of how a society is willing to spend. If you deem it a person's absolute right to have as much healthcare as they want, then it becomes everyone's obligation to pay for it, either through taxes or by requiring them to devote some of their labor towards providing that healthcare.
If you're going to be pragmatic and argue that having a required single-payer government monopsony on healthcare is a net positive, I think you also need to be pragmatic and willing and able to determine when its no longer reasonable to provide a person with as much healthcare as they want, as at a certain point any medical procedures are just prolonging someone's life so that they can consume more medical procedures without that person being able to contribute any reasonably amount of productivity back to society.
In the modern world it's all but impossible to escape from society. There's no frontier at present where an individual can go to be free of all laws save those of nature. If you can always argue that another person should be compelled to use their labor for the benefit of society at the expense of the individual, at some point you cross from just collecting taxes to what is essentially serfdom.
They won't scrap it, because replacing the algorithm with human bodies to do it is far more expensive. However, it's a defensive game from Facebook's perspective. It doesn't matter if they're right 99 times out of 100, it's when they get it wrong and part of their user base throws a giant tantrum and puts their giant persecution complex on display that Facebook will have to apologize and take their lumps in order to appease everyone. Hell, I think this has already happened a few times with their existing algorithms promoting something that was completely off the reservation.
I give this at most a week before something obviously fake gets promoted or the spammers figure out how to get around the algorithm and Facebook has to apologize again and looks completely inept.
The AI would probably have an advantage as its less likely to have discerning tells of its own because all of the easily discoverable ones would have been caught much earlier on, whereas human players who've only played against other human players might not have spotted and obvious and exploitable pattern in their play yet and even though the AI "knows" what it is, it can't easily tell them what they're doing wrong.
Jobs certainly had a good understanding of what people wanted and how to sell it to them, but I think the reason that they succeeded as a company had more to do with Cook. You can have as many grand visions for a great products as you want, and whether you're correct about them or not, you'll always fail if you can't execute.
Cook was instrumental in taking Apple from a level where they could make a nice product that they could sell at a higher price to afford the production costs necessary to meet their artsy design standards and aesthetics and turning them into a company that could demand exclusives and fund manufacturers in order to keep their prices the same but drop their costs to the point that their company is one of the most valuable in the world despite having a low double digit share of the market.
Cook probably has no grand visions for the next big thing, but he doesn't need to. He just needs to find someone or a group of someones that can see where Apple should pivot to next and Cook can make sure that they can turn out a good product for lower cost than many of the other companies that are using lower tier components or worse materials. I also think people are too quick to praise Jobs as some kind of genius. He had a lot of successes, or perhaps more than most in his position, but he also had a lot of failures and from some of the stories that have come up about them he wasn't completely responsible for the successes himself or sometimes was initially against them or had an alternate conception that probably would have failed.
Slashdot editor users one trick to get more article hits. Longtime readers hate him.