A new documentary on the downfall of General Magic
hyperallergic.com
hyperallergic.com
I have one of the CodeWarrior dev kits with the Mac emulator around here somewhere too.
This certainly wasn't the mantra in 1990 when the company was founded. This was a thing in the years after the dot-com boom. Definitely not in the early 1990s.
In the 1990s it was all about "first-movers advantage" which turned out to be a terrible idea: https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
The first isn't always #1 but often fails before later companies enter the market, learn from the example, and mature it into a real business (see Friendster->FB; Palm->iPhone; search engines; Netscape; Atari - although these are the still-somwhat successful 'failures' which is far better than most which you've never heard of).
Reminds me of that quote from Fredrick Pohl: "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. Renewable energy? Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Self-driving cars? Electric vehicles?
It's like how we knew that the Internet obsoletes privacy long before Facebook came out, and have known that burning fossil fuels causes global warming for at least 30-40 years, and knew that there was shit in the meat since The Jungle came out in 1906, and knew that heavy industry causes pollution for about 150 years. We didn't care because the benefits to us were greater than the future drawbacks. As time goes on, we take the benefits for granted, but the drawbacks loom ever larger.
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf
It should also be noted that the same studies showed general increases in health (particularly mental health) and in education, so this is not an unambiguous loss. My point is that usually when you fix one metric, you introduce losses in other metrics. There's no free lunch (and if there were, people wouldn't work as hard to feed themselves).
Individual have a sustainable workrate, and can exceed that for short or medium term periods, but at the cost of long term health. Calling "not exceeding your long term sustainable rate" "lazy" gives you something like the Japanese salaryman culture.
You would need to break the regulatory capture that artificially make housing & healthcare expensive before you can implement a UBI program successfully.
Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. Build more houses and the price of housing comes down. Train more doctors (or nurse practitioners) and the price of health care comes down. Both of these industries have strong institutionalized cartels, though.
I always thought this was the biggest problem Obamacare (well intentioned though it is) left unaddressed. It looks like the ACA lacks the reforms that would allow supply to grow to meet demand.
i mean, the ACA might have additionally:
* made it mandatory for US insurers to reimburse for care given by selected medical providers operating in selected foreign countries
* allowed nurse practitioners to operate in all 50 states
* eliminated barriers that, in effect, prevent doctors from foreign medical schools from entering the US and obtain a medical license
* allowed US patients to order pharmaceuticals from Canada or other countries
* allowed more pharmaceuticals which are already approved in foreign countries to be used in the US without additional FDA approval
these sound like desperate measures, but many many US patients are actually quite desperate
Uuniversal healthcare wait times:
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s...
Wind bird strikes:
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s...
And of course UBI = laziness is a moral judgement, not a rational argument about how humans should spend their time in a highly automated planetary economy.
If you research the source material for these points, the rhetorical slants are obvious.
The first is to encourage emotive responses ("bird strikes are bad and windmills cause them") while taking them out of context ("windmills kill far fewer birds and cause less migratory change than many other human activities").
The second is to exclude important contextual information and cherry pick figures to make a point.
E.g. Canada's public health care system has long waiting times - which are clearly bad. But it's misleading to compare them directly with the shorter median waiting times in the US - because that excludes the >500,000 families bankrupted by the health system in the US every year for whom the waiting times for future treatment are effectively infinite.
Decades of these kinds of distortions have made informed public debate very difficult. Building up a contextual and robust picture of the trade-offs of any activity takes a while, and the picture is only useful if it compares like for like across as many dimensions for as many competing possibilities as possible.
That rarely happens in public debate - and it should.
This is why life continues to suck despite 400 years of solid technological progress, even though nobody realistically wants to go back to the Middle Ages.
The trouble is that human happiness is mostly based on how well we're doing relative to others. So if your neighbor's circumstances improve a lot while yours improve only slightly then it feels like the situation is getting worse even when you're objectively better off.
One approach I use in thinking about this is where we go from scarcity to abundance. If you're on the scarcity side, abundance seems like utopia, but it brings its own problems.
An obvious example is food. For most of history, too little food was the problem. It still is for a too-large chunk of humanity, but for a lot of people the problem is now too much.
In my youth, my big problem was too little to read. Now I use all sorts of tools to manage the abundance and limit my exposure so I still at least occasionally read as deeply as I did.
Connection is another one I think about. In the age of the letter or telegram or long distance call, people were desperate to build and maintain connection. Now with ubiquitous connectivity, we get abundance phenomena like FOMO andalways-on work culture. And of course, we've made it easy for maladjusted people to connect and self-reinforce their awfulness, leading to more things like the Santa Barbara and Christchurch shootings.
Self driving cars for sure.
They remove the largest barriers to car use; that is, the costs of ownership, parking, and licensing. This latter fact means that they expand the total set of possible car drivers.
All of this means that the amount of cars on the road is likely to explode, which will dramatically increase congestion.
My expectation is that cities, which are already trying hard to shift people away from car oriented transportation options, will take a dim view of autonomous cars, and continue their efforts to shift away from the car.
The dystopian aspect I think will come from them being not self-driven, but Waymo-driven (or Tesla-driven, or whatever). You're not in charge, the corporation and the state are. That's not inevitable but it sure seems plausible. I remember when airline travel in the U.S. respected freedom of movement and even privacy.
That's a pretty good pitch.
But I'm a total sucker for ambitious hardware.
Am I way out of line here?
This strikes me as needlessly philosophical. People who take risks sometimes fail, and people with talent and money usually bounce back, especially if they don’t have kids. These are choices that very few are in any position to make, and this life is only for a very very small portion of motivated and a bit crazy people.
Uhh, what!? The success of the technology industry is that we use it to segregate society? That it's as natural as typing?
Is that really the narrative, or is this journalist using their platform to push their viewpoints while they report news?
If the ultimate vindication of the technology industry is that we can use it to completely filter out people we dislike from our lives, then we should take all of this and smash it right now. We should focus our energies into building connections between people, not tearing them down.
I read trolls as bad actors; people acting in bad faith just to get a reaction / cause someone else pain.
Trolls are a subset of "people we dislike."
I mean, why do we imprison and try to rehabilitate people instead of you know...killing them?
"Blocking trolls" (by this I specifically mean denying them access) is mob justice. In fact, there's even a supreme court ruling preventing the government from denying people access to social media. This isn't okay.
Feeling good about who gets punished doesn't make the form of punishment any better.
I'm comparing two forms of punishment that there is no way of coming back from. Learn to read.
With capital punishment, no amount of pleading by friends will help.
With blocking, you still have access to the entire rest of the world, other than the one person who blocked you. (Yes, if it's Google/Amazon, that's a big and massively inconvenient someone, but still).
With capital punishment, you have no access to anything you ever had or ever would have had in your life.
Those are massive differences.
At the very least, although there maybe a superficial sameness, it is a horribly broken analogy.
Facebook, Twitter, etc have quite publicly permabanned people. I'm sorry but what recourse from that has been demonstrated so far?
You're bringing up a person-to-person case that I have _three times now_ stated that I am not talking about.
People are doing that because that's what "block" in the social media context usually means. Sites ban, users block. And that's what the journalist probably meant too, so your position rather sounds like an attack on a strawman.
The lack of appeal is indeed egregious.
However, it is NOTHING like being killed / capital punishment. It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.
Mostly, I'd suggest putting more thought into your arguments, and being a bit more gracious when readers notice your lack of clarity or precision. I used to make those kind of arguments too, and I found that everything got better once I figured out it was a waste of time, and I was better off saying, 'oh, I didn't make that clear enough, here's what I meant to say..."
Anyway, have a great weekend!
So you acknowledge that I stated I wasn't making that comparison but you felt the need to state the same as everyone else anyway?
> It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.
You do realize that there are certain businesses/industries that _entirely_ depend on your access to social media, right? In a great many cases, losing that access is losing your income stream with possibly no hope of recovery.
The insidious part about that is that I'm not talking about people who make video content to be shared. If you work in Infosec, Twitter is your primary industry networking tool. It's literally required. If you buy and sell car parts, you are literally dependent on access to certain Facebook groups for customers and inventory. If you play Legacy format in Magic the Gathering or you're a card dealer? A lot of that business these days happens over Facebook. Most of you may not believe me when I say this, but it's the truth. And those are just the first three cases that I can think of that I have direct awareness of.
I have been guilty of the same kind of nonconstructive dialog but ... Let's aspire to better, eh?
Also, in the comment you responded to, I had already stated that I am specifically _not_ referring to individual-to-individual interactions.
As for your mall analogy, maybe if said mall is the one that 1/6 of the human population shops at, the nearest competing malls only have 1/20th of the people/stores/stuff and there's only 1-2 competing malls where the shopkeepers speak the same language as you.
Timed bans (with exponential increase for reoffenders) or permabans with a process to lift it are better. Then trolls who can be beaten into submission would be, those who can't will get effectively permabanned eventually and public places can be kept one step away from being toxic cesspools they would otherwise turn into.
How does one determine what values are pertinent to "we"?
"don't enable harm" (ahimsa) would seem to be a "we" universal, but how to scope it?