No, that's not my experience or understanding at all. Complexity is a byproduct of building something without understanding how all the parts fit together and without having a clear vision for how it will be used. The pyramids were built as monolithic monuments to the glory of a ruler intended to last millennia. They had a clear vision for what the end product should be, how it was going to be monetized and where material and labor was going to sourced before they laid the foundation.
Engineers thrown piecemeal at the edges of a problem will generate complexity. Engineers thrown into a room with a vision for what needs to be built and time to work out an elegant solution will get you to the moon with a pocket calculator.
I'm a big fan of barriers to entry and using effort as a filter for good work. This derma app could be so much better if it actually taught laypeople to identify the difference between carcinomas, melanomas and non-cancerous moles instead of just being a fixed loop quiz.
No, that was sarcasm that employed a slippery slope argument. I was not seriously suggesting that the federal government will buy Facebook. I was suggesting that we should avoid a pattern of behavior (slippery slope) that might lead to the socialization of other companies. Giving Intel a grant to keep it from failing is very different from demanding 10% in exchange for funds to keep it from failing.
If the argument was for protecting Intel, then the US government should be placing huge orders with Intel for solutions that will fund R&D and allow the company to regain its position as a foundry. They should be tapping into the defense budget. DARPA should be involved. This was an opportunity for petty extortion and a step towards socialism.
I agree. He should take control of Tesla, OpenAI, Palantir and Facebook next. Then privatize some of the leading quantum computing companies. Why do we even need venture capital if we can just build out an Office of Strategic Investment and control everything from the federal government. \s
In the rare conditions where this has been necessary in the past, US companies have been given clear terms for regaining control of those shares. I'm not seeing any buyback provisions.
Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.
Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.
How many false hypotheses today will seem like equally ridiculous superstitions to people in the future? I'm sure we can all think of a few popular beliefs that already fail under modest scrutiny.
Claims of privacy and user control are mostly "trust" based. A car that can be controlled and surveilled remotely, will be controlled and surveilled remotely. To dissuade potential customers of that notion they require faith in independent public or private institutions and their ability to verify that attacks on their privacy and autonomy are not possible. That doesn't seem possible in the zero trust environment people like Musk are promoting. Musk is his own worst enemy.
You're assuming that fragmentation will occur under the same conditions that affected Latin or French, where there was limited educational infrastructure, no formal institutions to guide the development of language, no global economic pressure for standardization and no instantaneous global communications infrastructure. The feedback loop for standardization is much shorter now, languages are continuing to evolve but that evolution reaches global awareness for synthesis and consensus very quickly. Regional accents and dialects are slowly disappearing and are no longer strongly influenced by factors of regional dominance.
Could there be a reversal of this trend? Maybe, but it seems very unlikely, even with the potential for geopolitical instability from global warming, autonomous warfare, the rise of autocrats and other factors.
My point was that English has been changing and in some instances those changes might have occurred to remove anomalous characteristics but English does have more old warts than most popular languages and I expect many of those will be removed as English recedes from its position of dominance over the next century.
Dr Dre is a professional poet and a very successful one by any standard. His whole stock-in-trade was American urban colloquialisms most of which can be traced back to English rural and working class and predate the colonization of the Americas. The early development of English "prestige grammar" and word usage dates back to the court of William the Conqueror and the reintroduction of romance linguistic influence on Anglo-Saxon English that lead to the development of Middle English by the 13th Century. What you understand as English "prestige grammar" today is a moving target, consistently evolving but still full of contradictions and single-case rules. Many popular European languages today have been modified to exclude these linguistic anomalies, making them more consistent, less error prone and easier to learn. I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
If MPC develops as an open standard and this "loophole" gains enough popularity, then companies can only really limit access to their services. This seems like a generally good thing that will enhance automation. In some cases it doesn't really matter if the automation comes from agents, hard coded software or a combination of the two.
Kids dress in drag when exploring comedy, theater, themselves... You might have a kid that's really into drag for any number of reasons and you might love them enough to want them to be the best version of themselves without imposing psychological trauma or making them feel like they need to hide parts of themselves from you. You still need to be a good parent, whatever that means to you but most parent don't want to limit their kids potential with distracting hang-ups. So I wouldn't say "absolutely no reason".
In typical DeSantis fashion, he's not signing any laws limiting this entertainment to "adults only" restricting access to anyone under the age of 18. And he's not passing laws to ban all drag shows across the state. This is political theater, in the same way that his two year presidential "grooming in schools" campaign resulted in zero arrests of teachers or librarians and the removal of completely unrelated books. And lets not forget
that the panel to remove books was lead by a political opportunist that was later implicated in a sex scandal that included allegations of rape.
It's adult entertainment but there's no nudity or explicit imagery. Some parents feel comfortable taking their kids, other's don't in the same way that some parents feel comfortable taking their kids to concerts or R rated movies.
FL has had excellent drag shows for 30-40 years and nobody gave a shit until a few party poopers pulled their heads out of their asses and decided to do some event searches. It's non-explicit adult entertainment usually for a mixed crowd, all laughing their asses off and cheering on the entertainment. Florida has more than enough titty bars, prostitutes and international sex trafficking rings to keep a Southern Baptist pastor happy but somehow men dressed like women singing popular music is too crazy.
I have personal experience with companies that consistently violate environmental regulations with very little understanding of the regulations they are violating beyond their effect on profit margins. They pay the fines or pay environmental engineers to help them pass an inspection that could potentially disrupt operations and are violating the same statutes 6 months later. The only regulatory clarity they care about is knowing which regulations can impact production and which can be gamed or paid off.
Not all regulation is a symptom of greed. Regulation can be written and passed with the intention of protecting the public good, promoting public health, preserving fair competition... That it sometimes works counter to those goals is a function of greed, a lack of accountability and and a lack of transparency. We write these laws with consistent check on accountability and transparency, but we keep electing sociopaths that want to game the system and sometimes go as far as screaming "deep-state" or "fraud, waste and abuse"... when they want to completely remove those checks and people keep falling for that bullshit.
People can be easily overwhelmed by simple challenges. At some point everyone experiences this and we learn to overcome bigger challenges through life.
Another point that might apply is that OP probably has a high center of gravity which can make kayaking really challenging. They should probably clarify this.
Stephenson's pre-cyberpunk first novel, Zodiac, is about an eco-warrior uncovering a chemical company pollution scheme. In Diamond Age, he talks about an air pollution crisis caused by dead nanobot swarms. From what I remember, most of his anti-corporate messaging was strongly tied to pollution but I don't even see that popping up in his later novels and I never really thought of anti-corporatism as a recuring Stephenson theme.
I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best cyberpunk manga after Akira.
Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you can see the real thing effortlessly.
I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk" appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea that all technology is socially transformative, just not in the ways we hope it will be.
Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.