303 karma · joined August 8, 2017
Spoiler: it's not
I mean, that has been Uber's MO since they started. AirBnB too, nothing new about this
> The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.”
or another spot where he says
"Every now and then we find an object of artificial origin. And this could be a message in a bottle, and we should be open-minded."
Seems to me like he is saying it could be worth considering that maybe this is an alien object.
> "It is much more likely that it is being made by artificial means, by a technological civilization."
This is highly dependent on company environment however and obviously can come with it's own set of motivations and problems.
Strongly disagree. Waiting tables or bartending at high-end restaurants could be considered gig work. Wedding photography is gig work. I have a friend who runs a stationary side business as a "gig". These jobs, if you are able to market yourself effectively and gain a good reputation and some solid contacts, can pay extremely well. I have a nice 9-5 with benefits and stability, but my friends in the above positions earn about the same I do and work close to half of my hours.
That obviously isn't the case for everyone who does these, but I don't think you can make the claim "the pay sux" for all gig work.
> If the number of team members and the fraction of boxes which are opened is fixed, the winning probability stays strictly larger than zero when more empty boxes are added
Replace boxes with nodes and now you have some math to determine graph traversals. Maybe a bit more math and you can expand it for multiple paths. I don't know though, I'm not a mathematician and I don't normally have to do more than DFS and BFS in coding interviews, but sure I can see some way that this might be useful.
[0] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/12/16/organic-101-what-...
> being citizens of a democracy obligates us to pay attention
I agree with the statement itself, absolutely. I just don't think reading the news is necessarily the correct way to pay attention. If you read most news, hardly any of it encourages better citizenship. Much like Facebook, the news requires eyeballs to survive, it has an inherent agenda. To collect eyeballs it needs to have enticing headlines. I hardly think "look at me" is the same thing as "education for a good democracy".
As for voting, you generally receive a "voter information" packet before hand. If you aren't reading the news then a "good citizen" ought to do their own research rather than rely on a news source to provide you with information.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program#C...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship#Budget_ov...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#Contro...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...