Discombulator

This might be various things, but “predatory” is not the right term for not allowing the user to benefit from a free promotion when he or she does not want to continue it. They even make clear exactly what will happen, no dark UI pattern involved.

I agree that this is a step back for Apple, we should keep the outrage for things that merit it.

I am using the Dreem 2 (dreem.com, use my referral code for a discount: UEXBFMANU). I do not have a certified reference device but those aspects of the recordings that I can assess (start and end of sleep, awakenings, onset of sleep, position) match my experience and are more accurate than the other devices I am using (Withings Sleep, Garmin Fenix 3). There are several in depth reviews on the web comparing the device output with state of the art polysomnogram recordings.

The problem with this argument in general is that there might always be unintended consequences for any change. Hence one should never try to change anything.

In this case, the argument about rising taxes seems completely arbitrary. Why couldn’t I likewise argue that they would actually be lower (e.g., by closing loopholes)?

> That's another topic, why can't the EU sort them out?

What do you think the EU should even do about this, based on which principles? To me this is entirely unclear.

There is no right to secede from a country, in fact, the territory is usually part of the identity of a country, also legally speaking.

Many (most) JDK distributions are free for all usages and fully open source.

Can you give some references for the patents issue you mentioned?

In my reading, your post implies that everyone is exclusively motivated by short term self interest. I do not think this is true, neither for myself nor for others, and I suspect you do not either for yourself and people you know.

The problem in general with negative fatalistic views like this one is that it is non falsifiable: there is not a single positive / selfless action to which you could not ascribe base motives.

I have not looked into Coda yet, but have a few observations on the user / programmer divide.

To me, spreadsheets are just another programming paradigm. I have seen business users build impressive things using Excel (excluding here VBA). I'd even say that in terms of raw productivity (i.e., just in terms of business problems solved over time, without any consideration for maintainability etc), the spreadsheet paradigm is vastly superior to the regular textual programming paradigm – as long as the problem is simple enough. And most of normal business is dead simple.

As soon as the process or problem hits a certain complexity, the Excel solution becomes painful to use, understand and change. I believe this is in part specifically fault of the tool - while Microsoft has been doing a great job in terms of power user features (Power Query, PowerPivot), they have apparently not been willing to extend the spreadsheet paradigm itself to meet the requirements we demand from business software, which is a pity and missed opportunity.

Secondly, what I have also observed is that most users, even users building complex workbooks, are not willing to make the jump to textual programming (e.g., VBA). I think programming in general requires a high level of frustration tolerance that most people are not willing to bring up except when they really have to (e.g., to use Excel, which is basically unavoidable in 99% of businesses).

To summarize, there is still room to come up with a system that makes building simple things as simple as Excel, while being flexible enough that it scales to meet production software requirements.

I think the real question is whether the failure rate of companies using Haskell is higher than those of companies using mainstream languages.

This is glossing over the fact that checked exceptions are a very controversial feature and that most language designers (is there any language besides Java that supports them?) do not implement them on purpose.

One of the best explanations of the issues of Southern Europe, and Italy in specific, that I read about during my studies, can be found in the book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (Banfield). It describes a village in southern Italy in which inhabitants are unwilling to contribute anything that does not immediately and directly benefit their own family. For example, they are unwilling to build a road to the next town, even given the large benefits the village overall would gain, because “only fools would do so” (paraphrasing here).

Seen with a game theoretic lens, and extending beyond Italy, it appears that there are low trust and high trust (or “social capital”) equilibria in societies, and it is especially difficult to go from the low trust to the high trust one. Secondly, these cultural norms and institutions (in a broad sense) are extremely persistent over time.

Of course, this is only one aspect of a multifaceted problem, but I find it particularly enlightening.

Just a small correction: as a business, you subtract the VAT on your suppliers’ invoices from the VAT invoiced to your customers. Effectively you remit the taxes only on the added value of your business, hence the name. This makes it also harder to avoid taxes. But in the end, the end user pays the tax on the full price, as you say.

These caricatures don’t help anyone. If you think like that, you should make clear that you speak for yourself.

Fully agree. Climate change cannot be tackled by individual action, just like hunger or poverty cannot. I have by now the suspicion that anyone suggesting so while arguing that no regulation should be put in place is either naive or in bad faith.

Overall, we need to let go of the idea that people believe things because they have evaluated the evidence and have come to a conclusion. This is scientific thought, and if you have ever changed your mind on a strongly held belief based on new facts then you know that it takes conscious effort and humility, which even the best of us cannot apply to every single position they have.

Instead, I am convinced that all of us believe mostly for emotional reasons: the need to feel important, the need to be part of a group, the need to maintain some social order etc. For most people, who are not willing or capable to apply scientific thought, all of these needs trump every fact you may have. If you want to “convince” people, you need to address first the underlying issue, which is often difficult: loneliness, social isolation, feelings of inferiority etc.

One example I found particularly striking for the contrast between the common “rationality” assumption and actual working of beliefs, is this paper by Max Adams: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9893/2a75ad8e79585e95c58a26...

I have read only about half of the paper. It is written in a very compelling style, though I get the impression that the authors have an axe to grind.

However, to play the devil's advocate for a bit, standardized tests such as PISA and TIMSS are taken as uncontested measure for the quality of an education system. If you believe in the _social constructionist_ view (as presented in the paper), then obviously you would reject such tests as a valid measure just as you reject them when used in education. Clearly, an education system that is _not_ focused - and excuse the simplification - on making students learn a defined, common set of facts, is never going to do well on tests. You could argue that this is by design, because the real goal of education is to (?) make students question the "social construct"(?)[0]

The question at this point would then be whether Swedish students are doing well on other dimensions - are they competitive on the labor market, do they live happy lives?

To make it clear where I am standing: I believe that in order to question anything intelligently, you need a strong and broad base of facts to base your criticism on. I do not think there is a way around memorizing at least for part of the subjects. I benefit at this point of my life of basic knowledge in many areas that I _had_ to study during my education and had no interest or inclination for - I would never have chosen for example to study the basics of civil or contract law, which was a mandatory part of my somewhat quantitative BSc course, but the concepts I learned were very helpful in practice when dealing with employers, landlords, banks, etc.

I think to ask children to find their own interests and "question things critically" - which I guess boils down to expressing individual likes and dislikes if arguing based on facts is not part of it - at that young age deprives them of learning about the structure and rules of society, and about the choices you have available. How do you know you are interested in biology if you have not seen it somewhat in depth?

[0] Making this up; it is not clear to me if the social constructivist' take on education makes even the basic promise of preparing students for life, whereas in traditional fact-based education the promise is clear: learn facts that will help you at work and in life.

Maybe also due to Amazon’s tightlipped PR policy, it is not uncommon to read in comments about some article related to amazon such as this one accusations about systematically increasing and even user-specific “dynamically adjusting” prices supposedly to maximize profits.

I don’t work there anymore since a bit, but I am somewhat annoyed by the unsubstantiated confidence with which these claims are made so I’d like to add my anec-data.

First of all, when I left the pricing system had in fact strong incentives in place to _lower_ prices as much as possible (for Amazon sold items. Third party sellers set their own prices.) Amazon would often make (small) losses on many items, especially the ones shown on the home page.

Moreover, there is definitely only a single price for each offer listing (which equals more or less an ASIN and merchant combination). This is evidently the case for 3P sold items, since as a seller you definitely do not have that infamous “auto-gauging” tick box the last time I checked. (And let’s not forget, most of the growth of Amazon comes through third party sellers). As for Amazon sold items, I invite anyone to actually show evidence that the same offer listing has at the same time a different price for different users/devices, otherwise it is just empty talk.

This is a classical example of a market failure. The issue is that today, when you you are buying any good, you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process. In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations. This is called a negative externality.

The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.

Note that market failure does not mean that the “market” mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.